


Run To You

by BlakeBroflovski



Series: Sentiment [7]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Anal Sex, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Death Threats, Dismemberment, M/M, OCD triggers, Series Spoilers, part of a series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-04-03 05:57:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4089538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlakeBroflovski/pseuds/BlakeBroflovski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/983204">It's Funny Because Eren Can't Read</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But your heart drifted off,  
> Like the land, split by sea.

Maybe it's a hard jolt of the wagon bouncing your head against the floor that wakes you, but you think it's more likely the rolling nausea in your gut, persistent even through the haze of your murky senses.

You'd been drifting in the fog of dreams, a sun-warmed cloud of tranquility that knows no danger — a place where you and Levi are sprawled lazily over a four-poster canopy bed with no curtains in a part of the world utterly removed from strife and fear, even his conflict with Mikasa forgotten.

The knot that tumbles about in your stomach like a stone skipping across a pond, casting ripples of nausea throughout you, is proof positive such a place is not the world you know, and never has been, and likely never will be.

Your memories aren't clear, floating across your mind like the specks that glide before your eyes in the sleepy hour of dawn, intangible and unreachable.  That much alone indicates you went berserker mode again.  This thought does nothing to alleviate the nausea.  They were counting on you, Levi was counting on you, your friends and the whole Corps and the whole god damn world was counting on you to keep it together and get this thing under control.  You have no idea whether you succeeded or failed on the mission, but if you indeed went berserk, you now have a personal failure whose consequences you have to face.  You hope this doesn't mean you're already on a one-way path to the firing squad.

You don't know if you're alone in the cart, but you keep your eyes closed anyway, just in case.  You're not sure you're ready to face anything you could possibly wake up to.

You count backward from ten, leveling your breathing, and try to focus.  Perhaps if you start with what you know and move forward with deliberation, you can remember what happened and, with luck, hide the fact that you went berserk.

You remember waking.  Levi had been unusually quiet and reserved, yet unusually demonstrative; he had helped you into your gear and practically dressed you himself from the toe up, had silently allowed you to return the favor in kind, had taken the pause at the gate of Karanes to tenderly brush your hair from your face and fix you with a look that said, you knew, he would love nothing more than to kiss you right now at what may well be the end of all things, if only it wouldn't mean the ruination of the mission and all it meant to accomplish before it even began.

You remember the unsettling levelness of his voice when he'd repeated his lesson about trust and making choices you won't regret.  You remember the shock on his face when you'd declared your decision to place your trust in him fully.

You remember the traps being fired.

You remember Corpsmen smashed into trees and swatted out of the air like flies, leaving nothing in their wake but splashes of red like paint flung onto a canvas.

You remember Levi leaving you, the ache that pulled your gut up to your heartstrings, as though he'd landed a grappling hook in your stomach and tugged your insides with him on his way out.

Then it gets blurry, as if trying to see through a window of warped glass, stained predominantly red.

There are many dying all around you, but you don't remember who, your memories focused on a target whose face you cannot recall.  There's a bit where your hands are gone, a bit where your jaw is gone, and after that, a claustrophobic bit that makes you shudder to remember, a tomb you cannot move to escape from, paralyzed, your mind flickering out of cognizance in an unconscious body.

You insist to yourself you couldn't remember any further if you tried, which is fine, because you're not willing to face trying.

Of all the things you do recall, though, you can't remember Levi coming back.

Abruptly drawn back to your surroundings, a spear of panic roars to life inside you, propelling you upright.

Your eyes shoot open.

You're not alone in the cart.  You don't recognize the heavily bandaged man who sits with you, whose groggy swollen-sounding voice sneers your long-awaited return to consciousness, nor do you recognize the cloak laid carefully atop you, now bunched up across your lap.  It's much too short to be yours.

"Eren!"

Mikasa's voice cuts across your thoughts like a blade.  You find her riding on your right, and for an absurd moment of confusion, you think she's riding backwards.  Once your senses realign and you realize she's facing properly and you are the one who's backwards, you begin to sweep the group that remains — a morbidly easy task, considering it is a fraction the size of the group that left.

You don't see your own squad anywhere.

They've all disappeared into smoke, along with Levi… and, you realize, along with a rather sizable amount of equipment that should have been devoted to keeping the controller of the Female Titan in check.

Are you part of a small unit that has been separated from the main fleet?

You turn to Mikasa, blessedly unscathed, and abandon all pretense of having retained your memories.  "What happened to her?  The titan?"

The rock of nausea gives a sharp lurch as Mikasa averts her eyes, something she only does when she can't bear to see your pained reactions.  "She escaped."

You remember the countless thousands, perhaps even millions, of cables binding the Female Titan in place and cannot imagine a way she could have freed herself.  It must have taken a colossal effort, and perhaps cost a colossal amount of lives.

"And the others…?"

Mikasa still avoids your gaze, staring resolutely ahead, and does not respond.

"What happened to the others?" you ask, more insistently.  "How many survived?"

The man at your feet in the cart snorts.  "Boy, you're lookin' at all the survivors."

You cannot help your lips parting, your mouth falling slightly slack; the rock of nausea rolls threateningly and you think you might throw up.

"And the mission?" you gasp past the looming likelihood of vomiting, turning back to Mikasa, desperate to wrench truth out of her above anyone else.

She focuses extra hard on leveling the reins in her hands.  Her voice is barely audible.  "We failed." She glances at you, if only for a moment, not long enough to process your reaction.  "You should rest.  We'll be at the wall in a moment."

True to her word, you've barely propped yourself back on an elbow and craned your neck around to get a look at the front of the cart when the shadow of Wall Rose swallows it whole, plunging you into darkness.

The clanging of the bell draws you upright again, though shakily this time, no longer propelled by panic but by a deep-seated rolling fear, and you don't get to hear Mikasa scolding you for it as her words are drowned by the rumbling of the crowd — a rumbling that, you swiftly gather, is altogether extremely malcontent.

This, like the knowledge you've once again gone berserker, does nothing to alleviate the mounting nausea.

It hits a peak at the sight of a small boy, no older than nine, dragging a frightened little sister up the ladder propped against a house, his chubby arm waving at you, exclaiming his veneration of the Corps in a trilling squeal that sucks the nausea up your throat.

The elbow propping you up fails and you fall to your side in the cart, vomiting the contents of your stomach between the slats.  Nothing comes up but bile, burning your throat, searing little points of ache into your teeth.  Vaguely, you hear the man at the end of the cart mutter, "Gross, Eren."

You wipe your drooling mouth on your sleeve, a sharp jab to your conscience reminding you too late there's some reason you're supposed to keep it clean, though you can't remember what it is—

And then it hits you, perhaps not by coincidence, at the same moment an unfamiliar voice calls from the din, "Captain Levi!"

You've rolled to face the front now, going up to your knees as best as your shaky skeleton will allow, and find the captain a few paces ahead, walking beside his horse, reins in hand, his cloak curiously absent.  A string of tension you hadn't realized was building between your shoulders slackens at the concrete evidence that he's here, he's okay, he's survived, at least one fucking thing in this shit heap of a mission didn't go down the tubes to fester under the sewers he'd grown up in.

There's a man you don't recognize speaking to him, tripping along beside the convoy, his smile familiar though you know you've never seen him before.  You can't hear much of what he's saying, the angry shouts from the rest of the crowd masking his words, but the one phrase you do catch is "Petra's father."

For the first time, you realize your squad should be flanking him — or at least, flanking you, keeping the Corps' most valuable weapon secured — but you already know they're not behind you, and as you scan the survivors before you they are nowhere in sight; the captain is quite alone.  He stares ahead without acknowledging the man's appearance, what little of his face you can see unfocused and empty.  Somehow, you suspect he's feigning indifference to hide guilt and shame; you have to remind yourself it's Mikasa who does that, not Levi.

And it happens — in a lull of the crowd's jeers, a bubble of quiet, his voice floats to you like a toxin in the wind.

"—just thrilled to devote herself entirely to you!  Of course, she's just excited, she had no idea how that kind of news might affect her father!  But just the same, I think it's still a bit too early to send her off to be married!  She's so young, after all, and—"

A cry from an angry resident sounds from beside you, practically right in your ear, and cuts off your access to whatever else Mr Ral has to say to the captain.

All the better — you couldn't have stomached any more, and you don't have any bile left to puke up.

Unable to hold yourself up another moment, you lie back, staring up at a cloudless sky that doesn't give a single fuck about this moment — not about how many thousands of lives have been lost just trying to earn a few footsteps of freedom, nor about the news of Levi's apparent engagement you've been living in witless stupid-fuck ignorance of for the past month — not caring that the world beneath it is crumbling, not bothering to drum up a fittingly somber atmosphere for the occasion.  To that sky, it's just any other day as they have been for hundreds of years, and you imagine if it could see you sobbing into your sleeve like a child, it would just laugh at you.  You should be long since used to this by now.

And it's right.  You've seen people eaten, seen people mangled and maimed, even been dismembered and swallowed yourself.  You thought watching your mother lifted from the rubble of her own house like a weed ripped up by careless fists, seeing her broken in half and torn to pieces, blinking through the shock of her blood spraying warm on your face, was the worst thing you possibly could've witnessed.  You thought yourself thoroughly saturated in the horror of the world, desensitized to it, numb — and by all rights, you should be.

But you're not.

You weren't ready.  You’re not ready.

You never should have trusted him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have broken bones and tattered clothes.  
> I've run out of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: surgical drug use, mild/implied body horror.

The convoy, or what's left of it, pulls into the stables as twilight gives way to dark.  You've barely rolled off the cart onto shaky feet when you hear his voice hailing you from his stall.  
  
"Eren."  
  
The word is flat and sour on his tongue like an ale left in a windowsill for days.  You don't care.  You're not angry — you're too tired for that; all you feel as your feet carry you toward his voice is a resounding indifference.  From what you can gather of the mission, from your memories before you shifted and the murmurs of others, its turnout means the remainder of your life is numbered in hours at this point.  Getting angry and dwelling on things like his engagement or his mood or his anything is pointless, a waste of the precious little time you have left.  
  
He's still holding his horse's reins, and he pivots to face you as you enter the stall.  He's worn out, but not at heart, as you are — his exhausted face is brimming with defeat, anger, apology.  
  
He waits until you're close enough for him to be heard at a murmur before he speaks.  "Heard you threw up."  
  
You nod, not sure how he got wind of that information, not caring.  
  
"You fit to walk?"  
  
You shrug, rolling an ankle to inspect your foot.  The sole has peeled away from the leather at the toe.  "Guess so."  
  
"Eren."  
  
You meet his eyes, and there's something else in there, but you can't identify it, too detached from any kind of sympathetic state to be able to read him right now.  "What."  
  
"Don't blame yourself.  For anything.  You did what you thought was best, and you shouldn't regret that."  
  
You snort wryly before you can wonder if you should hold back.  Fuck it, they're going to kill you anyway, there's no reason to hold anything back anymore.  "Did a lot of good, didn't it."  
  
He stares at you silently, looking down at your shirt.  It's come untucked from your pants on one side and the hem is ragged.  He doesn't seem put off by it, and he doesn't comment either.  "You hungry?"  
  
You shake your head.  His horse flicks her tail, and you watch the hair sway like so much rope.  You wonder if they'll hang you, or just shoot you and be done with it.  Maybe they'll behead you, cut your neck like the titan you are, so there's no doubt you're dead.  "Not really, no."  
  
He sighs, "Me either," and through the exhaustion, he sounds relieved.  He's quiet for a moment, and from the set of his jaw, he looks like he has something more to say, but is weighing the delivery.  At last, he says, "I think it would be best if you stayed in your cell tonight."  
  
You wouldn't have predicted he'd say that, but you can't say you're surprised.  The only thing that does surprise you is that you're not upset about it.  "Okay."  
  
"I have a strong feeling Erwin is going to want to speak to you, if not tonight then early tomorrow morning, and whether or not he knows you've been sleeping elsewhere, I think it would be a good idea for him to be able to report that he found you where you're supposed to be."  
  
You nod.  "Right."  
  
Levi is staring hard at his hand holding the reins, as if he's reading a script he's written there.  "That being said… I seem to have misplaced the key."  
  
You're not sure if he's trying to sound mischievous and failing because he's so tired, or if the lilt in his voice is an accident.  Still too weary to want to analyze it, you say, "You gave it to me and I lost it."  
  
"Right," he says, "right," and the mischievous lilt is definitely there this time.  "Well, then I guess there's nothing for it.  I'll have to stay with you."  
  
You blink at him.  
  
There's a moment — just one — that feels like an eternity contained in the space of a single heartbeat, and in that heartbeat, your wall of exhaustion breaks.  You realize you were angry with him, for messing around with you and brushing off his apparent fiancée in favor of you, for making you feel like it could be forever when he had other plans all along, for every time he ever flustered you or jerked you around for the fun of it, for every time he ever made you feel special and important and wanted because fuck him if he was lying for it, for daring to exist anymore.  But in that moment, you remember all those other moments, all the ones where he looked at you and you knew he was seeing nothing and no one else, and you know it was real, all along.  You remember him jumping in front of Petra's blade for you.  You remember that this is Levi, the man you've loved since you were nine, the man who taught you how to detach and how to persevere and how to dance and how to read, and you only have hours to live.  Being too tired to remember how deeply you love him is a shitty way to spend them.  
  
Your heart beats again, and you giggle through your nose, cracking a smile.  "I believe that would be the most responsible course of action, sir."  
  
He returns your smile, and he's still tired, but you are too, and that's okay.  You don't care that your last night alive, before Nile Dawk and his pack of wolves get to rip you to pieces, will be spent in a dank rusty prison cell, as long as you spend it with Levi.  
  
He swallows hard, and the smile is gone, replaced by the emotions you hadn't been able to read before — worry, self-loathing, fear.  It makes your heart knock on your ribcage.  
  
"Sir?"  
  
He opens his mouth, but pauses a moment before he speaks.  He swallows on nothing again and says slowly, "I need you to do something for me."  
  
"Anything."  
  
He isn't making eye contact anymore.  "I need you to get Hanji and bring her over here.  I don't care what else she's doing."  
  
He doesn't seem like he's about to offer further explanation, but he's gritting his teeth in a way you've come to recognize as bottled-up stress, so pushing down the lump of worry that's starting to rise in your chest, you just nod and turn to go find her.  
  
She isn't hard to spot because she's in the middle of the building, engrossed in conversation with the commander.  Her posture is stiff and grave, eyes wide, nodding every few words as the commander speaks in a swift murmur, his expression stern and thoughtful.  You're loath to interrupt, especially given they're likely talking about the mission you've just botched horribly, but fuck it, you're not about to spend your last night alive worrying about offending them.  
  
Erwin is in the middle of his thought, "—think I have to speak to Armin while this is all fresh in his mind.  He knows the boy better than any of us.  If there is a way, it'll be found by putting my head together with his—" and you get a distinct feeling almost like nausea that you shouldn't be overhearing this.  You clear your throat as you approach.  
  
She's already looking at you, drawn by the sound of your cough, when you greet her.  "Major Hanji."  Erwin glances down at you, his expression unreadable, and you nod at him and add "Sir" and immediately turn your gaze back to the major.  "Captain Levi needs to see you.  He says it's urgent."  
  
She looks back to Erwin, who gives a quiet nod and says, "I'll find you when I'm finished."  He turns away, you guess in search of Armin, and Hanji glues herself to your side as you lead her back to Levi.  She even puts a hand on your shoulder.  
  
"You feeling okay?" she asks, which is kind of a stupid question given what you've just gone through, but this is Hanji and her questions are always a little odd, so you don't mind.  "I heard you puked."  
  
You're suddenly curious who started telling people this and why.  "Yeah.  Had better days."  
  
"Man, that sucks.  At least you didn't piss yourself.  A lot of people do their first time.  I did."  
  
The anecdote is an attempt to calm you, you know, but it reminds you of your squad and watching them get stomped by a titan you failed to kill or even incapacitate, and your voice goes cold even though you don't mean it to.  "Captain, Hanji's here."  
  
He's still standing there, holding the reins.  He hasn't even tied her up to start untacking.  The beginning of worry rears its head, something about his behavior sitting very wrong.  It's exacerbated when he says, "Can you take care of my horse for me," and gives you a look that indicates he isn't really making a request so much as a plea.  You comply without a word, moving straight to the rope to tie her to the outer door of the stall.  It's subtle when shifts his hold from the reins to the girth, but as you take the reins and rest them near the horse's ears, you notice his grip is so tight his knuckles are whitish yellow.  The sharp pang of concern feels like a knee in the gut.  
  
His voice is quiet, and you're sure you're the only other person who can hear, but you go about unhooking the bridle as if you're out of earshot.  "Once you've done everything that can't wait until after, I need you to get a surgical kit and meet me in Eren's cell.  Bring Moblit."  
  
Hanji's voice is fretful but, for once, quiet.  "Why?  What's wrong?"  
  
He sniffs, shuffling in place, and for the first time you notice he's not putting weight on his left foot and realize he's not just holding his horse's tack, he's leaning on her for support.  She spits out the bit, and you move as slowly as possible to hang it up, trying to give him time to finish with Hanji so she can leave before he has to reveal his condition.  He avoids eye contact with her, too, and gives the vague response, "I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need it."  
  
She looks past him to give you distressed eyes, but you just shrug.  You're as in the dark as she is.  
  
She nods at him, says "of course," and departs on swift feet, her demeanor uncharacteristically subdued.  The moment she's out of sight, Levi releases his horse and extends his arm back toward you.  He's still leaning heavily on his right leg, his left foot barely hovering above the ground.  You trip forward and give him your upper arm to lean on, and he grips it hard, his fingers sinking to the bone as he uses you as a crutch to step back until he can lean his shoulders against the wall.  He crosses his left ankle over his right, and he looks for all the world as though he's bored and aloof and not barely concealing what must be an incredibly painful injury.  
  
You elect to ask him about it later.  "What else do you need me to do?"  
  
"Finish untacking," he says quietly, crossing his arms and staring at them.  "And carry my pack.  We can just go straight to the cell, since neither of us wants to eat."  
  
You nod, unbuckling the girth as fast as your fumbling fingers will allow.  
  
He uses your arm for support on the hike inside headquarters, but he grips your arm in a way that looks like he's pulling you along, rather than the opposite.  He stops you only to pick up the cloak that had been your makeshift blanket in the cart.  You try not to think too hard about what people must've thought when they saw him lay it over you, but, you remind yourself, it is your last night on earth and you don't have time to not be gloatingly happy about that image.  
  
Stairs present a challenge you're glad no one else is around to witness, because he has to stay one step behind you and lean on your shoulder pretty heavily, and while his limp was concealed quite well on even ground, it's far more obvious when he has to skip stairs with his good leg before his bad leg can take on any weight.  He sits on your cot with such force something in it cracks, but he pays no mind, letting out a sigh that shakes a little at the end.  He props his shin over his right knee and presses fingertips gingerly to his boot, inspecting the damage, and though he doesn't make a sound, his face flutters and scrunches, and you know him better than to not be aware that he's in considerable pain.  
  
He tries to pull his boot off and can't.  He does make a sound then, a sharp gasp through clenched teeth, and he doesn't try again.  
  
He meets your eyes, and the question you've been damming back slips through your mouth.  "What happened?"  
  
He blinks slowly, as if trying to decide how to phrase it.  He shucks his jacket as he speaks.  "Your sister decided it would be wise to go for a kill strike on the Female Titan while I was in the middle of incapacitating it to rescue you.  It was not wise."  He folds his jacket in his lap and talks at it, hands running over the creases.  "What was, perhaps, less wise was my decision to swoop in like a big damn hero and kick the titan's incoming hand away from her."  He shakes his head at himself, taking the folded square of his jacket and laying it over your pillow.  "I should know better by now than to try to save people from titans.  Never works out in my favor."  
  
You glance at his ankle; even in the shitty torchlight, you can see that it's swollen, straining unnaturally at the leather of his boot.  "Sounds like it worked when you saved me."  
  
He looks up without lifting his head, his gaze carefully blank beneath his eyebrows.  "Lucky titan drool evaporates.  You were fucking filthy."  
  
You smile at him, not sure what to say, but he doesn't seem to need a response because he gives a tiny smile you're almost not sure you're not imagining and folds his hands on his knee.  
  
It's several minutes before the dungeon door slams open and two sets of boots scamper down the stairs.  The orange of the torchlight does nothing to put color in Moblit's paper-white face, his expression taut and terrified.  Hanji makes no jokes and wastes no time in setting up lamps around the cot, neither of them bothering to waste the few seconds it would take to acknowledge your presence, and you take no offense at this, jumping in to help light the lamps and set them at waist height.  Hanji leaves her portion of the task to you, setting up a tray and unfurling a leather knife roll full of scalpels and clamps and suturing tools.  It's not until she's pulled on latex gloves and a paper face mask that she says, "What's the damage," and her voice, muffled through the paper, is so matter-of-fact it sets your stomach rolling.  
  
Levi doesn't give an explanation, leaving it at a succinct, "Broken ankle.  Feels like an open fracture.  Can't be sure, can't get the shoe off."  
  
"Oh fuck," she says, and when she says "Lidocaine," it takes you a moment to discern who she's talking to and what she's even said.

Moblit scrambling with a satchel and producing a sealed vial of clear fluid answers your questions, though, and when he says "Epinephrine?" and she nods silently, he produces a second vial.  You watch with an almost horrified kind of fascination as she inserts a hypodermic needle through the rubber seal and draws the liquid into the syringe.

"Cut it off," she says as she takes the second vial from Moblit's outstretched hand without looking and repeats the procedure.  The needle does something funny to your stomach and your brain feels itchy.  Something is trying to dawn on you, but you aren't sure you want it to, and suddenly the room is too bright.  The sound of a razor slicing cleanly through leather helps you shake off the fuzziness in your head, and you blink clarity back into your eyes to see Moblit tossing aside Levi's shredded shoe and cutting a line up his jeans from the ankle to the knee.  There's a lot of red on his sock you're certain isn't a trick of the light, and Hanji playing with the syringe is now incredibly interesting to you.  She holds it inches from her eyes and monitors it over the top of her glasses as she slowly pulls out a precise, microscopic amount from the second vial before discarding it into Moblit's satchel.  She slaps the syringe against her palm a few times and points the needle toward the ceiling, depressing the plunger until a fine jet of serum shoots out.  It leaves the syringe still almost entirely full, and the idea of all that drug disappearing into Levi's flesh makes that lightheadedness threaten to come back.  
  
She assesses the injury, now fully exposed, and lets out a low whistle through the mask.  "That's an open fibular fracture if ever I saw one."  
  
"Thanks for the diagnosis," Levi drones.  "This is gonna suck, isn't it?"  
  
"Suck big-time titan balls," she says, directing her gaze toward him at last, and though her words are light, her tone is still grim.  "You ready to roll?"  
  
His eyebrows are set in a hard, unamused line, and he looks as though he would rather chew on glass.  "As I'll ever be."  
  
"Um," Moblit's tremulous voice cuts in, and Hanji looks to him.  He looks as though he would be wringing his hands if not for holding the uncomfortably dark red remains of the left leg of Levi's clothes.  "What about, um…?"  
  
He's staring at you, and Hanji looks your way, her eyes almost startled, as if she hadn't realized you were there.  She blinks at you a moment, then says, "You ever helped with a surgery before, Jäger?"  
  
You're staring very hard at her hands in an attempt to not look at the patch of red starting to seep into your sheets.  You have, but operating on Levi is not a concept that thrills you, and Levi cuts in before you can respond.  
  
"Only help I ever saw him provide was comic relief.  Couldn't even bring me a drink last time."  
  
You're too dumbstruck by the situation at large to be upset at him, even jokingly, for bringing that up again.  You don't argue when he holds out a hand and waves you over, inviting you to take it, and when you do, pulls you onto the cot to sit beside his head as he lies back.  
  
Hanji wastes no time swabbing Levi's skin with an alcohol-soaked cloth, and as she moves, she says, "Moblit, while we're waiting for this to kick in, run up to the mess hall and grab Jean Kirschtein."  The name makes your stomach flip-flop, and your hand tightens in Levi's.  
  
Moblit chirps, "Kirschtein?"  
  
"He was in Ness's squad," she says, lining up the needle behind the bulge on the inside of his ankle, "he should know where all the hardware is.  Tell him I need an extension rod for a bed frame, the crank drill, a screwdriver, and at least seven two-centimeter screws.  Then get your butt back down here, I'm gonna need a pair of steady hands."  The needle sinks into Levi's skin, and you look away, staring at his face instead.  He's watching Hanji work impassively, as though he's been bidden to memorize her moves.  His hand is still gripping yours hard.  Hanji pauses, glancing up at Moblit with wide eyes, and trills, "Are you waiting for something?"  
  
"Sir," Moblit complies, and scampers out the open cell door.  
  
Hanji hovers around Levi's foot, inserting the needle at least four more times before sitting back.  Inanely, the alphabet song pops into your head, and you're struck with the completely absurd urge to laugh.  You refrain.  She wipes her forehead with the back of her sleeve.  "And now," she sighs, "we wait."  
  
Levi is still staring at his own foot.  "How long?"  
  
"Couple minutes," she says, popping the needle off the empty syringe.  She wraps it in paper and tosses it in the satchel; the syringe, she replaces in the leather roll, from which she withdraws a scalpel and several identical tools that you first mistake for small pairs of scissors until you recognize them as hemostats.  She wipes each one with the alcohol-soaked cloth, thorough enough for once to match even Levi's standards.  
  
After four of the clamps have been completely sanitized, Levi's hand changes pressure on yours, going slack for a moment, squeezing hard, then slackening again, and it draws your gaze from Hanji's work to his face.  His eyes are starting to glaze over.  
  
"You okay?"  
  
"Is this supposed to make me," he says, and his voice sounds oddly gummed-up, "like… kinda tired?"  
  
Hanji laughs, doglike and loud even through the mask.  "Oh it's gonna make you more than tired, buddy.  And more than kinda."  
  
"My…" He swallows a couple times, licking his lips.  "My… neck feels heavy."  Hanji giggles to herself but doesn't respond.  Levi turns his head back and forth as though looking around, although his eyes are shut.  "What if," he says, "what… if this is a dream."  
  
"It's not a dream," Hanji says absently, minding her work at sanitizing her tools, and suddenly you have the distinct impression she's done this many, many times before.  
  
"No," Levi says, his voice garbled, as though his tongue is getting in the way.  "No, but it could be.  What if every… thing is a dream.  Everything.  Does it all mean anything."  He turns his head away, but his eyes remain closed.  "I don't… am not making sense."  
  
You shift beside him, but he doesn't acknowledge you more than to squeeze your fingers.  At the movement of his own hand, his eyes snap open to stare at it, as though surprised to find it's still attached.  His gaze is foggy.  "Oh my god," he says, his voice grave.  
  
Your gaze flicks between his hand and his face.  "What?"  
  
He doesn't respond, but he shakes his head a little until he gets caught up in the movement of his neck and his head just flops to the side, and Hanji doesn't bother holding back her giggles anymore.  "I think it's kicked in."  
  
"I hate this," he bursts out, his voice so loud you jump.  "I hate the drugging and the stupid, I'm not even drunk, okay," he insists to no one, scrunching his eyes shut, "listen."  
  
Moblit's footsteps tumble down the stairs, and Hanji doesn't bother responding to Levi, barking out instructions for her assistant — places she's going to cut and where he needs to clamp the hemostats.  The movements of his hands are surprisingly steady and smooth.  You try to tune the two of them out, but Levi's reaction to the anaesthetic twists your stomach into nervous coils, and you don't want to have to acknowledge that, either.  He moves his head back to stare at you, and it flops across the pillow like a fish.  His gaze is unfocused.  
  
"I need to tell you something."  
  
You're not sure how much you should let him talk, if you should let him talk at all, but looking to Hanji for direction proves fruitless — she's too occupied with her surgical duties to walk you through comforting a drugged superior officer — and you elect that as long as he doesn't move his leg, you probably ought to let him do and say whatever he wants.  Easier than trying to keep him subdued.  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
He swallows on nothing, and his face screws up as though it's an exceedingly difficult task.  "I need to tell you."  
  
"What do you need to tell me?"  
  
His hand leaves yours and wraps around your waist, pulling you close, and he says, "Lie down with me.  Lie down with me."  
  
"I can't, I'll get in Major Hanji's way."  
  
"No just," and he reaches across himself to tug at your hips, "just do it."  
  
You meet him halfway, and you scoot down the cot until you can lean back on an elbow, his head next to your armpit.  The moment your face is within a reasonable distance, his hand grips at your shirt and tugs you down toward him, and you realize an instant too late that he's trying to kiss you.  You manage to catch yourself and prop yourself up with both arms such that he can't pull you down the whole way, and he tugs for a moment before noticing he's no longer succeeding.  He makes a grunting noise of complaint.  His mouth opens, and in that instant, you know he's going to say something incriminating, and you cut over him before he can speak.  
  
"Levi.  What did you want to tell me?"  
  
"That you have a great ass," he says, and the statement draws Moblit's complete attention.  Peripherally, you're aware of him blinking owl-eyed at you.  Hanji bursts out laughing over Levi's good ankle.  The spitting and snorting noises she produces make you glad she's wearing the mask.  
  
You know you're blushing and you hope they're not paying enough attention to notice.  "Well, thanks," you say, only kind of sarcastically.  
  
And he isn't done there.  "You like my ass too," he says, and now he's giggling too, "don't you."  He nods as if to answer his own question.  "You do.  You grab my ass all the time.  In the shower and in the mornings and wh—"  
  
"Levi," you cut in, trying not to let your voice reach a frantic pitch, "wow you talk really dirty when you're drugged up, don't you!"  
  
His giggling turns to outright laughter, and it brings out his dimples.  "You love it when I talk dirty!  You love it, you, you're so dirty Eren.  So dirty."  
  
Hanji has to put the scalpel back on the tray, she's laughing so hard her hands shake, and you stare toward her as if she could offer you help.  She doesn't.  Moblit is probably blushing harder than you are, and he won't meet your eyes.  
  
Levi is not deterred by you looking away from him, and he steamrolls on, "Do you know that the first time you stayed in my r— no not the first time, it was the second time.  The second time you stayed in my room I actually," and he lowers his voice to a whisper, as if that will help, "I had a dirty thought about you and I had to," he glances downward as a punctuation mark, "do a dirty thing about it."  
  
You kind of want to strangle him.  "Good god you're so high right now."  
  
Footsteps on the stairwell make your heart leap into your throat.  If Jean comes in and hears Levi talking to you like this, you are literally going to kill him.  You've got to get him talking about something else.  
  
"I really want to thank you, by the way."  
  
"You're welcome," he says, and he sounds haughty.  "You were getting eaten and I saved your ass.  Your cute, pretty little cute ass."  To your horror, he tries to grope at you, but the angle is wrong and he ends up pawing at the small of your back.  
  
You seize his wrist and hold it firmly in place. "No," you say, "I meant for teaching me to read."  
  
Hanji, having regained control of her giggles and missing most of the show, lets out a loud "Aww!" and then gasps.  "So that's what you two have been up to, sequestered all alone!"  
  
"Oh good," a voice behind you says, and your heart drops out of your gut.  It's a girl's voice, cold and quiet, but with a certain softness that pervades despite any emotion.  "I was truly curious about that."  
  
Hanji grunts a frustrated noise at Moblit.  "I told you to grab Jean.  I need someone who knows where the hardware is."  
  
"I did!" he squeaks at the same time your sister says, "He did, I just wanted to see Eren.  But this, this is really something."  
  
Hanji apparently decides that's a good enough reason for her, because she murmurs something to Moblit about needing a second hemostat to ensure the bloodflow is completely cut off, and half of it is drowned out by a loud scraping noise as Mikasa drags the metal chair in the hall across the floor to sit next to your side of the cot.  
  
Levi notices her presence at last.  "YOU," he says, and his countenance would come off enraged if he weren't slightly cross-eyed.  "You're the reason I'm, this is happening to me."  
  
She stares at him, her face blank, and you pray to every deity you've ever heard of that he doesn't start talking about, or grabbing at, your ass again.  
  
He disappoints you immediately, giving you a sagacious grin through the doped-up haze.  "You know what I wanna do right now."  
  
"Go to sleep and wake up when your surgery's all done?"  
  
"No," he says, and he sounds offended.  "Come here, come here and I'll tell you."  He tugs at your collar, trying to pull your ear to his mouth, and you sigh and comply, keeping your face firmly turned away so he can't try to kiss you again.  He whispers, "So I'm not gonna be able to prop myself up for a while, y'know."  
  
"I know."  
  
"So I want, I was thinking, you should.  Sit on me when we're."  He snorts, and spittle flies into your ear.  You jerk back on reflex.  It's just as well, because he starts laughing that high-pitched bubbling laugh, and he probably would've deafened you.  He finishes with a giggly, "Doin' the do," and laughs into your armpit.  He inhales on the tail of his laugh and suddenly his mood flips like a switch, and he's turned severe and disgruntled.  "I can feel my chin touching my neck and it's making me very upset."  
  
Hanji finds this statement too amusing to continue unhindered, and she removes her scalpel from the line of work for a second time so she can hide behind her wrist as she laughs.  Levi yells at her, and you think he's trying to say that it's not funny, but his speech is gummed up again, and he mumbles something to the effect of having too many teeth.  
  
You don't even notice Jean entering the cell.  Out of nowhere, suddenly Levi is screeching, "HEY!  POCKET OF FUN FACTS!" and pointing toward the door, and you look up to see what he's pointing at to find Jean standing there, hands clenched around fastening tools, thoroughly bewildered.  
  
He points a hesitant hand into his own chest.  "Me?"  
  
"YES," Levi cries, and you have to shush him because he's right in your fucking ear and that's kind of painful.  "Share a fun fact," he says, slightly less deafening, "do a fun fact."  
  
Hanji waves him over, but he moves falteringly, as if wary of getting too close to the clearly inebriated captain.  "Uh… okay?  It's a fact that, uh, if y—"  
  
"No," Levi insists, "get it from your pocket, get it from your pocket."  
  
Jean looks as baffled as you feel, and he doesn't seem to notice Moblit snatching the bracing supplies from him and rushing back to the tray to sanitize them.  He makes a noise of confusion, and suddenly, with an "Oh," you realize what Levi is talking about.  "Remember that time at breakfast, when you guys didn't know who he was yet?  You made a joke to Reiner where you pretended to pull an insult out of your Pocket Of Fun Facts."  
  
"Oh."  He stares at you, eyebrows furrowed as if only just now noticing you're here, and then his gaze drops to Levi's hand trying to grope at your ass again.  You grab his wrist and wrap his arm high around your waist instead.  "Uh," he says, his sight locked on your hands entwined, "so, here," and pantomimes reaching into his pocket and pulling a note out, though it contains none of the zeal and fervor it did when he performed the action at breakfast.  "So, did you know," he reads off the imaginary paper, "that if you eat nothing but rice and water for like a week, your shit will turn white."  
  
Levi shakes his head hard at that one, and Hanji loses her shit for a third time, but this time you really can't blame her because "Jean, what the fuck, where do you even get a fact like that."  
  
"Sasha," he says without looking at you.  He's just noticed Mikasa is also in the room, and he's turned a wondrous shade of pink.  Perhaps it's your imagination, but his voice sounds a little too high-pitched and insistent as he says, "I have no personal experience with this, none at all.  But Sasha says it's true.  She's told me about it a couple times.  Like, I'm half expecting her to try to prove it to me at some point.  It's completely vulgar and inappropriate."  
  
"It's completely fucking hilarious," Levi says, but his face and voice are flat and serious.  "That's.  That's too incredible to be true."

You level Jean with a stare that contains all the irritation you feel at this entire situation.  "The entire world of useless trivia, open for the picking, and you had to choose one about shit.  Do you even understand Levi's relationship with shit?"

"Yes," Levi agrees, his eyes too wide.  "You're amazing.  That's perfect.  You're perfect."  
  
"Careful," Hanji says, and at first you think she's talking to herself or to Moblit because he's lined up the thin steel rod inside Levi's leg and she's beginning to mark where each hole is to be hand-drilled, but she goes on, "you keep talking like that, you're gonna make Eren jealous."  
  
You take it back — you're not going to kill Jean.  You're going to kill Hanji.  
  
Perhaps she notices your intent in your stare, because she meets your eyes for a blink and giggles, "Oh come on, this is funny."  
  
"Maybe for you," Mikasa says calmly, and you add, "Yeah, it's not your ass he's talking about grabbing."  
  
"And I wouldn't be complaining if it were," she retorts matter-of-factly, and to your utter shock, Moblit breaks away and laughs so hard he coughs.  
  
A third set of boots sounds on the stairs, and you don't realize you've said "I swear to god I'm gonna kill whoever that is" out loud until Commander Smith replies with, "Well, I certainly hope not.  The Military Police Brigade doesn't need further reasons to try to seize you."  
  
You sigh heavily, and you turn toward him as he enters the cell, mouth opening and about to apologize, but Levi beats you to the punch.  He points at the door so hard the cot wobbles, and he declares, "You look like this guy!"  He points back and forth between Jean and Erwin, who look startled and bemused respectively, crowing "You look like this guy!  You look like this guy," and Erwin, bless him, has the grace to roll with it.  
  
He looks Jean up and down and says, "I suppose it's the chin."  
  
Mikasa actually snorts at that one.  
  
Erwin points at Jean and Mikasa and says, "With me, if you please."  He can't meet Hanji's gaze to address her since she has her back to him, so he says, "Major, when you're finished, if you could meet us in my quarters."  
  
"Okie-dokie," she says, not looking away from her work with the crank drill, and wait, no, suddenly the last thing you want is for the extra company to be taken away.  You hadn't realized how much they'd been distracting you from facing the horror of Levi's leg laid open to the bone a few mere feet away from your face.  He continues calling out how Erwin looks like "this guy" until their boot steps have faded out of range, and you have to call his name to get him to stop yelling.  
  
When he does, it's to close his eyes and take in a few slow, deep, heavy breaths, and you say his name again to make sure he's still okay.  
  
He blinks up at you, and his face breaks into a smile as if he's been looking for you for years and can't believe he's finally found you.  If he weren't so drugged, it would make your heart stop.  
  
He cradles your chin in a clammy hand.  His skin is cold.  He whispers, "My ears are ringing."  
  
You brush his hair off his face and whisper back, "It's okay.  It'll be over soon."  
  
"I feel like I'm gonna throw up."  
  
"You're not gonna throw up."  You smile and add, "I already did that today, you don't need to do it too.  You're okay."  
  
"You promise?"  
  
You nod, running your fingers through his hair.  "Promise."  
  
"Hey," he says, and he takes your hand, holding it gently in his.  "Listen."  
  
The sound of Hanji cranking the drill is too much to drown out, but you try.  You wonder if he can feel it boring into the bone.  "Yeah?"  
  
"I really do wanna tell you something.  I should've told you last night but I didn't.  I didn't, 'cause, I didn't want to say it and then lose you.  But now they're gonna try to take you from me anyway and I can't, I can't let them do that.  I can't.  So I've gotta say it because waiting is stupid."  
  
You shift on the cot, lying down beside him as best you can.  Your legs hang off the mattress from the knees down.  "What?  Say what?"  
  
His hand squeezes yours, but it's frail, weakening.  He whispers, "I love you."  
  
It's as if you've sprinted full-tilt into a wall.  
  
You've been sharing his bed and his bathroom and his body for a month, have touched him every place it's possible to touch and have felt him brush fingers upon parts of your soul that wake up as if from a deep slumber like bright points of light at his touch, have watched and felt and marveled as every ounce of your being has melded with his in all ways physical and not, have watched him, allowed him to, take your soul into his hands and cradle it as his own, because it is, and not once has he said those words.  
  
You nestle close to him, brushing the tip of your nose over his, and try not to cry.  You suppose as far as timing goes, your last night alive isn't too bad a moment to say it at last.  
  
You smile as a tear rolls down your nose.  "I love you, too."  
  
The cranking of the drill is tinny and grating, but it doesn't bother you that much anymore.  
  
"Listen," he whispers.  "I know I'm high as fuck right now, but I know some things.  And I'm serious about this, I can't let them take you from me.  So if they try, if they do it.  I'm fighting.  Okay?"  You nod, knowing he means it and only has the courage to say it because of the drug, and he squeezes your hand.  "I'm not playing the game anymore.  If they come for you, we run."  
  
"Where?"  
  
"I don't care."  
  
You nod slowly, your nose brushing over his.  "Okay."  
  
He sighs, as if all the tension in the world has just been cut from his back, and says, "Okay."  
  
You watch his face until he falls asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All that imprides of ruin — it's in our design.  
> So human.  
> How do the young survive?

Eren Jäger never shuts the fuck up.  
  
It's not a bad thing — it's pretty endearing, actually, provided you're rarely annoyed by the topics he chooses to prattle on about — it's just part of who he is, and you're pretty attached to every part of who he is.  
  
It does, however, make the uncharacteristic moments where he does fall silent grip your heart like fists, because if he's thinking instead of speaking, something's wrong.  
  
Today, something is very, very wrong.  
  
You'd awoken from a twitch of your leg jerking you out of sleep, and in that white hot moment of dazzling, brilliant pain, you'd wanted nothing more than to sink back into the drugged haze that was the last thing you'd remembered.  Losing your sense of self has always been, and still remains, one of your sharpest fears.  But in that fog where your identity was gone, there was also no pain.  Cognizance was a pain so blinding it robbed you of your ability to think or breathe or lie still or do anything but scream, so weakened it had come out as little more than a whine.  
  
He'd awoken too, though, and was on your leg with a needle that you'd felt brush too close to the bone before you'd had a chance to piece together what he was doing.  
  
Relief came in increments, and he'd told you as you'd come back to yourself that Hanji had left vials of a local anaesthetic in small enough doses that you wouldn't be sucked back down into the drugged fog.  For a few minutes, before it had kicked in, you'd been torn whether you wanted to be sapient at all if it meant the pain.  
  
When you'd settled at last, satisfyingly numb, you'd noticed the thing strapped to your foot.  
  
It was made of fabric, almost like a lace-up boot, though it was lined at points with sheets of something hard and inflexible — likely metal — that would not allow your ankle to twist or bend.  With luck, it would provide enough support that you'd be able to put weight on it, but a kettle of anger had begun to boil in your gut — you wouldn't be using maneuver gear until it healed, and how would you save Eren from the MP if you couldn't fly?  
  
You'd do it anyway.  There would be nothing for it.  Fuck your ankle.  
  
He'd helped you up the stairs — the brace held — and showered while you'd drawn a bath to avoid wetting the brace or your injury, but it hadn't been until he was helping you pull on a fresh pair of socks that you'd noticed he'd been strangely quiet, only speaking when spoken to and even then, only in short mumbles.  
  
Now, as you spin your cup on the tabletop in the abandoned mess hall and he sits on the opposite end of the table, staring at the wall in utter silence, the boiling kettle in your gut has turned from rage to fear.  
  
"Can you believe it's been an hour and we're still waiting," you say, and he gives no indication that he's heard you.  "Why did he bother telling us we have to talk if he's not even going to meet us here.  What exactly is he waiting on that's so important, is he watching his own hair grow?"  
  
He blinks once, his breathing slow and even, and says nothing.  
  
"I mean, if we're supposed to meet up and have a friendly little chat and tea party instead of heading straight out, that must mean the plan has changed.  Could he not tell us that much, at least?"  
  
He glances down at his palms, then folds them in his lap and resumes his empty staring at the wall.  
  
You let out a snort of dry laughter.  "This is just like what he did to us when I enlisted," you say.  "Did I ever tell you about that?"  
  
He looks over at you then, and your heart leaps to have gotten a reaction out of him.  "You said he put your face in the mud."  
  
"Well, technically, Mike did that," you say, crossing your bad leg over your good one.  It's starting to ache, a dull noise in your bones, but that's fine.  Aches, you can handle.  "Basically once I agreed on all our behalves to be sworn in, they took us up to the surface and put us in a carriage and took us to the training field outside Trost.  Still muddied up and everything.  But then they just shoved us in the head office and told us to wait, and we sat there for literally, I shit you not, three hours without a word from anyone."  You almost laugh at the memory of Isabel's irritated face, her pout making her look all of three years old, and try not to remember what her face looked like the last time you saw it attached to her body.  You shut down the memory entirely at the reminder that the last time you saw her face, period, it had not been attached to her body.  Eren isn't looking at you anymore when you snap out of it, his gaze clouded over and aimed straight ahead again.  
  
You sigh.  
  
"Anyway," you say, pushing your cup around with a finger, "at least they gave us a teapot last time.  Could've done it for me now.  Does he not realize I had to actually walk in order to get this one from the kitchen?  Asshole."  
  
You wait for him to show amusement at your crassness, but he doesn't.  
  
"Can't believe he's making us wait like this," you mutter, picking up your cup and staring at the contents.  "At this rate, the MP is gonna get here first."  
  
He lets out a noise that might be a sigh, but he's so far away from you, you can't be sure.  
  
"Maybe… he's trying to take a shit, but the shit just won't come out."  
  
He snorts in spite of himself at that, but says nothing, and with a throb of guilt and resignation, you give up trying to snap him out of his funk.  You drain your cup in one loud slurp and stare into it, as if the dust clinging to the porcelain will help you.  He still hasn't touched his own tea.  It's not even steaming anymore.  You want to brush it off as the fact that it's Jin Hoú, which you've noticed he's not particularly fond of, not even when you blend it with Darjeeling, far more partial to the Yinzhen you break out on especially relaxed occasions — you wonder how he would've reacted to the Lapsang Souchong you found once in the Underground — but still, for him to be drinking nothing at all is so worrisome it has your stomach in knots.  
  
"Captain," he says, and you meet his eyes with trepidation, concern boiling faster in your gut.  He doesn't call you that anymore, not when you're alone — only when he's feeling neglected or doubting himself, and considering the words the Lidocaine gave you the bravery to finally say last night, you're at a loss as to why he would be feeling either of those things.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
His eyes drop from your face to your hand, still holding the empty teacup.  "You're pretty talkative today."  
  
You're tempted to help yourself to another cup, but you really don't want to have to piss during transit, so you refrain.  "Don't be stupid," you mutter, but your voice is kind.  "You know I'm always plenty talkative."  
  
"I'm sorry," he says, and your stomach flips over because you hadn't meant to hurt him, remembering too late he hates it when his intelligence is insulted, even jokingly.  But before you can open your mouth, he goes on, "Back then… if I hadn't made the wrong choice, then… everything could've been different."  His gaze drops lower, toward the table, and his voice is almost inaudible as he says, "Because of me… everything was ruined.  Even you were injured."  
  
You realize he's not looking at the table, but through it, toward your ankle.  It gives a pang of ache in response.  
  
You stare at him, for a moment at a loss for words.  Is this why he's been so quiet?  He feels guilty about your injury?  
  
"This isn't your fault," you tell him with raised eyebrows.  "I'm the one who decided to dive in and save her."  
  
"Which you wouldn't have had to do if not for me."  
  
"If you're going to go that way, it was Mikasa's fault for acting directly against my explicit orders to just be a distraction and give up on trying to kill the titan."  
  
"Which she wouldn't have had to do if—"  
  
"If not for the titan taking you in the first place," you cut in, and you're trying not to be impatient with him because you've been here, exactly where he sits, with these exact thoughts in your head, the blood from Farlan's lifeless torso staining your hands, and you tell him exactly what Erwin had screamed at you through the rain.  "It was the titan, Eren.  No one else."  
  
"But it wouldn't have turned out that way if I'd just faced her, then and there, while I had you and the whole squad to support me.  Maybe you wouldn't have been hurt.  Maybe no one had to die."  
  
The words needle at you in a way you hadn't expected, and before you're willing to take the time to orchestrate exactly what you're going to say, words are pouring out.  
  
"I made a wrong choice too, once," you say, and he looks up at you.  "There was… a mission.  That we were supposed to carry out.  The opportunity presented itself, and I elected to take on the task alone, leaving Isabel and Farlan to meet up with the rest of our squad.  I trusted them, trusted our whole squad, to keep them alive.  I thought they would be safest there."  
  
He blinks at you.  "But they weren't."  
  
Memories flash through your mind in images you try to suppress and keep foggy.  "No," you murmur.  "They weren't.  And yes, it is all because of the titans, but the idea that I have absolutely no influence on any given situation is something I've always had trouble accepting, and maybe, if I'd made another choice, they wouldn't have died.  Maybe, if not for my damned pride, I wouldn't have had to pull the intact half of Farlan's body from a titan's belly, or close Isabel's unseeing eyes on a head that was no longer attached to her neck."  
  
He recoils a little, but only a little, and you applaud him for that.  The horror of what you and your friends went through is something that triggers empathetic memories in him, and if he's able to face that, then he's well on his way to acceptance and recovery.  
  
"But I didn't kill them, Eren.  They had choices, too; everyone had choices, and I didn't kill them, and you didn't kill my squad."  He's looking at the tabletop again, and he closes his eyes, trying with all his power not to cry.  "It was the titans, Eren.  Only the titans are to blame.  We don't know what they're after, or why they do what they do, and as long as we remain ignorant, they're going to keep doing it.  As long as our choices lead us to answers, that's the most important thing we can do."  
  
You hold onto that thought.  
  
You have to.  
  
"But… how," he says.  "How do we know our choices will lead to answers?"  
  
He blinks unseeingly at the table, and with a heaviness in your heart, you recognize that this is one of the areas where you differ — Erwin's words were able to pierce the fog of your guilt and shame like a beacon, but Eren isn't capable of being pulled out by a well-placed word or a helping hand.  He has to fight his way out on his own.  
  
You stare at the floor.  You can't help him, and it feels like drowning while holding a life preserver that won't float.  
  
"I told you," you say quietly, spinning your empty cup in its saucer.  It makes a faint squeak.  "No one knows how their choices will turn out."  
  
It takes you a moment to realize he's looking at you again, and another moment to summon the bravery to meet his gaze.  He weighs his thoughts as you watch each other, and then, drawing a careful breath and holding it for a beat, he says, "Did… did you mean it?"  You're not sure what he's talking about, and you tilt your head, and he elaborates, "What you said las—"  
  
A knock on the door cuts him off, and Erwin's "I'm so sorry to be late" ensures he won't get to finish his thought aloud.  Complain as you might've done seconds ago, at the moment, you'd like nothing more than to boot him from the room and make him wait until Eren is well and damn finished, but you're stilled by the realization that the MP still aren't here, and that means the timing is definitely fucked up somehow, and Erwin just hasn't had the courtesy to enlighten you.  Asshole.  
  
It takes you longer to glance over your shoulder than it does for Eren to shift his gaze past you, and he blurts out his friends' names before you can register that Erwin isn't the only one entering the room.  
  
Mikasa's scarf is loose around her throat, a sign you've come to recognize as indicative of anxiety, as you've noticed a tendency for her to pull it over her mouth when deep in thought or concerned.  She doesn't spare you a glance for so much as a blink.  
  
Fine by you.  The most important thing is established right off the bat — Eren won't be summoned to the Capital for another two days, and that at least gives you some time to talk about whatever Eren had been in the middle of saying just now.  
  
The moment the paperwork hits the tabletop, you're engrossed, finding it far easier to debrief yourself than to try to follow Erwin's preamble of why his plan is the Best Plan and why we have to dedicate our hearts and blah blah his usual speech.  As usual, his plan is based pretty much entirely on conjecture and postulation.  And usually, you don't have any doubts, as you've learned his theories are always right and his gambles always pay off.  But this time, the conjecture isn't his own.  
  
It's Armin's.  
  
Armin Arlert poses an interesting challenge to you.  Cursorily, it's because he seems so easy to read, so transparent, and yet you can't tell how much of that transparency is genuine versus a very, very convincing act.  He's shocked you more than once already, and you're anticipating far larger shocks to come.  He's a mini Erwin in the making, and valuable as he could be under your command and working with the people who know him best, you're annoyed enough by one Erwin.  The world doesn't need two.  
  
Moreover, you hate that he seems able to read Eren's mind far better than you can.  
  
You can't put your finger on what exactly triggers it — he's never given any kind of indication that his feelings for Eren are anything but familial, and Eren has certainly never displayed attraction toward anyone but you — but there is something about him that makes you deeply, undeniably pissed off.  
  
You know it's irrational and unfounded, and you feel guilty for feeling it in the first place when you know there's no reason for it, so you do your damnedest to never let it influence your behavior or judgment.  
  
Part of you believes he suspects, though.  He's too perceptive not to.  
  
The fact that he clearly knows about you and Eren, and has been running defense for you since day one, is something for which you are both immensely grateful and inexplicably irritated.  
  
Your nerves, already on edge through the anaesthesia starting to wear off, are tweaked to snapping when you notice Eren has returned to his readable, chatterbox extravert self, and it's not because of you.  
  
He's broken out of the fog of self-loathing, but not into a good mood.  He's unwilling, or perhaps unable, to believe one of his comrades could possibly be a turncoat, even though you'd said as much was possible back when you'd first begun your affair — on the day you'd begun, actually, the same day Armin had arrived at headquarters.  You're a little surprised to note the one they suspect is the only one of his friends who isn't in the Corps.  The curious side of you would like to know why she chose another faction, but the business side of you, which is most of you, gives a shit only about the validity of Armin's hypothesis.  
  
"Hey, kid," you cut in through his paper-thin attempts at giving himself room for doubt, "you keep going on about what you _think_ you believe and what _might_ be, but I'm not hearing a part where there's actual proof."  Eren looks at you as though the sun is shining out of your ass, and that look is enough to shift the budding jealousy in your chest from resentment into gloating.  "Do you have any real evidence?"  
  
"Yes," Mikasa jumps in.  "I think the Female Titan's face looks like Annie's."  
  
You stare at her, and you're beginning to trust your long-since established suspicions that her feelings about you are pretty much a mirror of your feelings toward Armin, except without the guilt of knowing it's unfounded.  She can suck it up, though, because you're already here, you've already won.  "Well," you say, putting as much contempt into that word as you can.  "That's very promising."  
  
Eren seems to agree with your sarcasm, leaping out of his chair to screech disbelief that their basis for executing the plan is all one big mass guess.  The flame of gloating in your chest burns brighter.  
  
"So what you're all saying," you paraphrase, crossing your arms, "is that we don't have any proof, but we're going to do this anyway."  
  
Eren is dumbstruck.  "Wh… what do y… wh…"  He swallows on nothing, staring around at his friends, who refuse to meet his eyes.  "Why are we doing it, then?"  
  
Armin doesn't seem to have an answer.  You look to Erwin, who is staring at Armin so intently the boy's face should be melting off.  A ball of nausea swirls in your stomach.  If Erwin trusts Armin's hypothesis enough to base Eren's redemption on it, you're pretty sure that means it's well founded and you should trust it too.  Erwin's beliefs have a proven track record as being interchangeable for fact.  But it's still not from Erwin himself, the familiar source, and what's more, it's from Armin, the boy who could giggle and blush and apologize Eren clean out of your arms if he wanted to.  
  
Eren is watching him as if he's strangling kittens.  "What if it's not Annie?"  
  
"Then she's free of suspicion," Mikasa says evenly.  You're getting the impression she doesn't care much for this Annie person.  
  
"I would feel bad for her," Armin says, something you can't decide at all whether to believe because he's too skilled a liar and that makes everything he says suspect, "but if we don't do anything, you're just going to end up a scapegoat for the guys in power, Eren.  We can't just hand you over.  We have to act, even though it's a huge risk and there's nothing concrete to back it up, because if we just give up, we lose you, and all hope for humanity with you.  Acting on a chance is better than not acting at all."  
  
You let out a long, quiet sigh.  
  
This is why you're so conflicted about him.  He does genuinely care for Eren, and even apart from his attachment to him, he has a firm grasp of the perilous situation humanity is in and what you all stand to lose without him.  He's smart, and with that kind of brainpower and willpower combined, he's an invaluable asset in helping you save humanity and Eren alike.  
  
He's a boon for it, but… he's also kind of a threat for it, too.  Not to humanity, but to you personally, and setting aside that prickling on the back of your neck is something you're having an irritatingly large amount of trouble doing.  
  
Erwin's voice is smooth and even, as always.  Unlike Armin, who's got a few things to learn before he's quite on Erwin's level of playing chess with people, he has the perfect voice for persuasion — trustworthy and certain.  
  
"We'll go with this plan for now," he says.  "If evidence presents itself within the next two days that irrefutably discredits Annie Leonhardt as the Female Titan, we will have to regroup, but for the time being, it's the plan with the biggest potential payoff and the lowest potential loss in the event it backfires."  
  
Eren fixes you with a hopeless puppy-eyed stare, and you sigh heavily.  "Guess I can live with that."  
  
"Good," Mikasa says, and she rises to leave.  Armin follows suit slowly, his eyes stuck on Eren, who in turn only has eyes for you.  Subtly as you can, you nod him back into his chair.  
  
As Erwin brushes past you to follow the two recruits and the guards toward the exit, you reach up and touch his sleeve.  He stops cold, watching the others leave, and as soon as they're past the threshold, he murmurs, "Eren, will you close the door, please."  He scampers to comply, though his face is still a giant question mark.  
  
The moment the latch clicks shut, you say, "You talk about possible need for regrouping but I don't see anything in here about a contingency plan."  Erwin sinks into the chair at your right hand, and Eren mirrors him, plopping into the chair at your left.  "So, what if the escape goes perfectly smoothly?  What if she gives us nothing?  What if it's not even her, and we're left with Kirschtein in MP custody and all of us at fault and wanted for questioning in regards to suspected treason?"  
  
Erwin eyes the door for a moment, studies your hands flipping the corners of your paperwork, drums his fingers on the tabletop.  He says, "I don't think that's going to happen."  
  
"That's nice.  What if it does?"  
  
He watches you scrutinizingly, with interest, like you're a single-celled organism under a microscope, and you hate him for it.  His voice is composed and even, and you hate him for that, too.  "Do you have a contingency plan?"  
  
"I have a single motive, and if this contrived horseshit fails, I'm following through on it."  
  
He glances at Eren, who doesn't miss it, shifting a little in his seat.  "And what is that motive?"  
  
"They're not taking Eren," you say, "I don't care the cost.  Humanity can't afford to lose him.  If they want to kill him, they'll have to go through me, and they're gonna have a hell of a time if they're bound and determined enough to make an enemy out of me."  
  
His voice is still guarded.  "Are you saying you'll oppose them openly?"  
  
"I will be as clear with my motives as I'm forced to be," you say simply.  "If they push, I will push back."  
  
He studies your face.  You've known each other for more than six years now since he saw the conditions you were living in, saw your willingness to fight when evasion didn't work, knew you wanted to kill him and gripped your blade as you inched it ever closer to his throat.  But you weren't honestly bent on killing him; you were frenzied, that's all, and he was able to talk you down from it.  He's never seen you truly and singularly aiming to kill.  If he thinks watching you kill titans is an indicator, he is mistaken, and you think he knows that.  His face is always carefully controlled, but you can see the switch go on in his eyes when he recognizes something, and you're reasonably sure he's aware that the bloodthirsty killer's instinct you tap into when fighting titans is just that — a wellspring into which you can tap, drawing tiny amounts like molasses down a spile.  He cannot possibly fathom the true depth and horror of your willingness to kill, and he knows it.  He knows, also, that you don't want to go back to the man you were and would have to be pushed to the peak of absolute desperation, but the light switches on behind his eyes, and you think you've impressed upon him just how determined you are to keep Eren safe, and it's a depth he hasn't witnessed and shouldn't want to.  
  
"I see," he says at last, looking away from you to his hands folded on the table.  "In that case, should the plan backfire and produce no results we can use to free Eren, I trust you to make the best decisions at your disposal to keep him safe."  
  
You know he can't say "I give you permission to abandon the Corps and run" or "I give you permission to kill MPs" because if any unexpected parties were to overhear those things, it would be certain disaster, but you know those things are what he intends to say, between the lines.  
  
You nod.  "Okay."  
  
Erwin's nod echoes yours.  "I'm glad we're on the same page on that point," he says, and you know what he really means there, too — "Thanks for telling me you intend to rebel if necessary instead of just, y'know, doing it."  
  
"Me too," you reply.  _You're welcome._  
  
"Alright then," he says, pushing his hands into the tabletop as he stands, "if that's the only point on which there was a lack of clarity, I must be going, if you don't mind," and you nod again, just once, as a signal that he's allowed to depart and it won't piss you off.  
  
Left alone in the dining hall, Eren stares at you as though you've just volunteered to throw down your life to save his, and that's probably because you have.  
  
His breathing fills the space between you, and it's not until he swallows hard and you hear it go down that you realize that space is getting smaller.  
  
Then his hand is on the back of your head and he's on you, kissing you, his mouth crushing yours, all eager bones and uncomfortable angles and anyone, literally anyone, could walk in and catch you right now, and for once, you don't care.  You start to kiss him back, but he's already withdrawn to press his forehead to yours, apparently only seeking just the one, and his voice is shaky as he says, "I swear, I won't make you fight the entire MP for me."  
  
"You'd fucking better," you say, "because you throwing down your life doesn't help us at all.  Do you understand what your loss would do to us?"  You stare at his eyes from inches away.  They're watery and swelling fast.  You grip both of his hands in yours.  "…to me?"  
  
"As if your loss is any more acceptable to me?" he says, and you start to tell him that's not the point because it's his life the monarchy is trying to take here, not yours, but he cuts you off with another kiss and you catch him fast enough to return it this time.  
  
You have no orders until your summons to the Capital two days from now, and neither does he, and you've got a few ideas to fill the time, so long as your ankle is willing to cooperate and he's willing to be a little unorthodox.  
  
You whisper one such idea in his ear, and he giggles, going a brilliant shade of red, and instead of saying something incredulous or flustered or even dirty in response, he says, "I love you."  
  
Suddenly, you remember the thing he'd been in the middle of asking you when Erwin had barged in at last — "Did you mean it?  What you said las—" and you realize he was saying _last night_ , and _oh_ —  
  
You smile at him, and dammit, your eyes feel watery too.  "I love you too, Eren."  
  
He grabs you by the hand and pulls you from the room, and your heart is racing.  You've never been so starkly aware of the upbringing you should've had, the life every kid has, where you go to school and get in scrapes and come home to your mom's warm cooking and complain about strict teachers and hold hands with crushes under desktops.  You wonder if Eren's ever done any of those things, and while you're glad he wasn't subjected to the childhood you were, you're also relieved to think that maybe, probably, you're the first person he's dragged away giggling to make out with in secret.  
  
This kid's gonna make you young again if it's the last thing he does.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somebody,  
> wake up my heart,  
> light me up,  
> set fire to my soul.

You've seen Eren transform into a titan a handful of times, during training.  
  
Before that, you'd seen the smoking remains of what you now know was his titan's body, collapsed in a heap at the blocked gates of Trost, and you'd paid no attention to its form, having no idea it would prove immensely important.  
  
The explosion had thudded in your chest, physically rocked you backward in the saddle, even made your deaf horse skitter in place.  The bolt of lightning had nearly blinded you, but not enough — not enough to prevent you from witnessing cords of binding muscle and facia materialize out of nothing, not enough to keep you from watching Eren borne into the air and encased in a cocoon of flesh that wrapped around him like hands, not enough to stop you from seeing him disappear into a monster of his own creation.  
  
You've fended off packs of grown men who came at your tiny form with filthy words and slacks that were tented at the groin, you've watched your would-be father turn his back and walk away and never return and abandon you to determine your own fate at their clawed hands, you've watched your mother struggle to cough through her last breath and sat there watching her skin go yellow as a horrid smell filled a room you could not leave because if you left, they'd kill you, but this.  
  
This had terrified you.  
  
You've learned many things through books, and had to learn many more through experience and skill, but this is one of those things you know at the core of your gut without reason or backing.  
  
That _thing_ , that giant, lipless, dead-eyed _thing_ , is the truest form of the boy you've fallen in love with, and one day, you'll have to confront that fact.  One day, be it with him or against him, you'll have to face what resides within him — not the titan, but what it represents: the manifestation of the primal, animal rage he keeps locked in tight like your eagerness to kill, like the secret in his father's basement.  
  
And now, as he lies on his back, wrapped up like a caterpillar and snoring gently to the ceiling, you've never had so much trouble picturing him that far gone.  
  
Mikasa's chair could only get closer to his face if she could phase it through the bed, and you keep having to fight off the urge to laugh.  You sit at the foot of the bed, legs stretched across the mattress, with a book on your lap.  Not for the first time and you're sure not for the last, Mikasa shoots you a look full of venom, as if she could evaporate you from the spot with a glare.  But she can't, so not for the first time and you're sure not for the last, you look up at her and meet her dead in the eye and ask in a saccharine voice, "You need something, soldier?"  
  
She lets out a breath you can tell she has to refrain from being a growl.  "No," she says in a tight voice.  
  
"Oh good," you say, going back to your book.  You cross your left ankle over your right, and the brace digs in at a weird angle.  You shift until it's not completely uncomfortable.  "I might ask you to get my syringes from Hanji, then, if this gets worse.  My leg is just killing me."  
  
You don't sound like it's killing you, your voice nonchalant, but it draws her gaze to your ankle, and you really can't help but smile a little at that.  
  
Okay, maybe more than a little.  
  
"Yeah," she says, catching on, "you look miserable."  
  
"I only smile to keep from crying," you say, and she looks away in disgust.  You don't want to be her enemy, really you don't, but her intense jealousy is kind of hilarious and sometimes the impulse to needle at her is more than you can resist.  It's an absolutely teenage impulse, and if you take a moment to step outside yourself and examine how you're behaving, you're ashamed at being such an immature little shit, but the giddy childlike wonder of the other night keeps coming back to you and your satisfaction at getting to feel like a kid outweighs your embarrassment at acting like one.  
  
It's a satisfaction that heightens when Eren's snores fade into nothing, and though outwardly he doesn't move, you know he's awake.  
  
You wonder if she knows him well enough to realize it, too.  On a level of common sense, you know she does, but still, you hope she doesn't.  
  
She does.  A wire of tension runs through her form, pulling her upright, and when she says "Eren?" her voice is delicate, like too much volume or pressure or emotion will break him.  
  
Going back to your book, you mutter, "Oh, leave him alone."  
  
As if to agree with you, he groans loudly, holding it out the entire time it takes him to grip fistfuls of the cover and pull it over his head, no easy task because you're sitting on it.  His strength surprises you: he manages to tug the blanket up and drag you along with it, though it pulls you off balance and you have to adjust yourself and the brace once he's done.  
  
Mikasa doesn't acknowledge any of this.  "How are you feeling?"  
  
You want to say _he turned into a rage monster and decapitated the rage monster form of one of his friends, how do you imagine he's feeling,_ but Eren is a big boy, capable of answering for himself, so you refrain.  
  
He groans out, "Hungry."  
  
You'd imagined he would've said "tired" or "sore" or a simple "not good," and his response surprises a laugh out of you.  Mikasa shoots you an acidic look and says, "I'll get you some food, Eren."  You raise your eyebrows at her, as her tone makes it clear she's only intending to bring food for one, as if somehow this is supposed to offend or isolate you.  
  
It doesn't, and you pretend you don't take the hint.  "That's kind of you, soldier, thanks.  Extra rice in my serving, please.  And if you could tell Hanji I'm going to need my medication, I'd appreciate it."  
  
She stares at you, and you smile back, until something in her face gives, shifts from anger to resignation, and she sighs so heavily you think Eren's sheets should've fluttered in the gust.  Putting her hands to her thighs and pushing herself up, she rises, sighs, "Yes sir," and heads for the door.  It closes gently on her way out.  
  
The moment she's gone, you seize the cover and whip it off Eren's head.  
  
He groans so loud and high it turns into a whine, tossing his head to the side as if that will help him retrieve the blanket.  "Give it baaaaack."  
  
"Why," you say, your voice uncomfortably close to singsongy and you don't care.  "You cold?"  
  
"Yeeessss."  
  
"Think I can help with that," you sing, definitely sing this time, the grin you've been doing a shitty-ass job at containing for the past hour lilting your voice even further, and — a bit clumsily because of the brace — you crawl up the mattress and slide under the covers with him.  
  
He takes a moment to process this before he reacts, his brain moving through the slog of drowsiness as it usually does for the first ten minutes or so after he wakes.  But when he does react, it's to shuffle sideways and squeal, "You realize she'll be back any second!"  
  
"No she won't," you say, forcing an arm under his squirming waist and pulling him back toward you.  "You think I'm stupid?"  
  
"Y… no?"  
  
You stare at him from an inch away for a moment, your face going flat.  "I'm insulted."  
  
He blinks wildly.  "I'm… sorry?"  
  
"You act like I've never done anything behind anyone's back before," you say, shifting to fix what parts of you are lodged uncomfortably behind his.  "You need an ace in the hole, Eren.  And we have one.  In the form of an extremely nosy extraverted titan dissector and turd nerd."  
  
He stops wriggling around and stares at you, his eyes owlish.  "Hanji?"  
  
"Yeah."  You take advantage of his stillness, using the moment to pull him close to you and lodge your head under his chin.  "I instructed her that, if we were to find ourselves alone at any point, she is to keep it that way."  
  
"And… she's gonna follow through on that?"  
  
"She might be a little socially inept at points, Eren, but she understands the consequences of anyone seeing what's going on here.  Of course she'll follow through."  
  
At that, his face goes slack, his body relaxing in your arms.  "Oh," he says, his voice low and soft, and it makes you grin all over again.  He hugs you around the shoulders, burrowing his cheek against the top of your head, and lets out a long, peaceful sigh into your hair.  
  
His chest is warm under you, even through his shirt.  He's always warmer than you, and though sometimes it drives you crazy at night when he breaks into a fine sweat, overall, you don't dislike it.  It's far preferable to the way you've always slept, cold and alone.  You're kind of amazed at how quickly you've gotten used to the change, and a moment flits past that tugs on your heartstrings as it goes, as you realize how badly you want that change to be permanent.  You don't want to go back to sleeping cold and alone, ever again.  
  
Your heart skips.  There's a word for that kind of permanence.  
  
It carries a weight you aren't sure you're ready to burden him with, aren't sure you're ready to bear yourself, a weight you never thought you'd be in a position to consider.  
  
Maybe it's a weight you can ignore a while longer, then.  
  
"So, seriously," you murmur, dipping a hand under his shirt and tracing over the bare crest of his hip, "how are you feeling?"  
  
"Mostly just hungry," he says in earnest, and you pull back to aim a pinched look at him until a light goes on behind his eyes and his stare of innocent confusion shifts to comprehension.  "Oh," he says, "you're asking if I want to sleep with you."  
  
"Wow," you say, your voice bland, "you're astute."  
  
"In that case, I'm feeling fine and dandy.  Fit as a fiddle, even.  Ready to take on the world."  
  
"Well, maybe not the whole world," you chuckle, sliding on top of him and propping yourself up on an elbow.  "Just me."  
  
He smiles at you, and it catches your breath.  He doesn't always smile at you like this, like by watching your face he's found the answers to every question mankind has ever posed as long as the history of questions stretches back into time immemorial.  But when he does, it makes you shiver to the bones, because what in the hell could you conceivably have done to have earned such a look from this person, this beautiful boy whose words move mountains and whose soul is the sun.  
  
His hands brush your hair off your face, curling around your ears, cupping your chin, cradling your face as if he's caught a shooting star as it fell.  "You _are_ my whole world."  
  
Sometimes the sun caged inside him bursts out of him in these shining beams, in words like this, in the way he speaks so freely and honestly without stopping to consider that people don't talk like that anymore, if they ever did.  
  
"That's the gayest thing you've ever said."  
  
"Why don't you slick up a finger and see if I say something gayer."  
  
…and then, sometimes, it bursts out in these whips of scorching heat that sear brands on your expectations as soundly as an iron would to your skin.  
  
"You're not gonna say much of anything with my dick in your mouth."  
  
"Oh," he says, grimacing a little, his voice going disdainful, and you raise a playful eyebrow at him, "is that where you're planning on putting it?"  
  
"What, you've got a better idea?"  
  
"Yeah, I think you should put it in m—"  
  
"I mean for shutting your glib little mouth," you cut in, and he laughs.  
  
"Oh, that?  That's easy."  And he tips his chin up until his lips meet yours.  
  
Eren kisses the same way he speaks — freely, honestly, without pause or second thought, and with a lot of movement from his hands.  They slide into your hair, tickle behind your ears, trace lines down your throat and over your shoulders.  Every time he kisses you his hands explore somewhere new, and you're sure by the time he's your age and you're fifty, he'll be able to carve your entire effigy from granite blindfolded.  
  
And there's that weight again, that thought about that particular kind of permanence, and you don't realize you're so caught up in the thought that you've stopped kissing him until he pulls back, nudges his nose into yours and whispers, "What's wrong?"  
  
You shake your head, eyes closed.  You swallow.  The roof of your mouth is dry and itchy.  "Nothing."  
  
"Don't lie to me, Levi," he murmurs, and his voice is kind but raw, "you can tell me you don't want to talk about it and I'll let it go, you know that, but please don't lie."  
  
There are times, like now, when you're stunned at how easily he can read you.  You've never especially tried to be unreadable, not like Erwin does, but you've gleaned that you tend to be by nature due to what Hanji calls your "resting bitch face" — a mask of churlish, rancorous irritability that no one could see past, or even want to.  But Eren sees right through it like it's not even there.  He seems to know exactly what you're feeling at all times.  You're not sure when that started, and when you try to think back, you realize with a bit of a jolt that he's pretty much always had a good bead on you.  It's like his spirit communicates with yours on a level other people can only dream of.  
  
And there you go, thinking all that soulmate crap again.  You're not quite so old that you'd get caught up on wistful romantic bullshit like this, are you?  
  
He's watching you patiently, but the patience is wearing thin, waiting for you to either explain or ask him to drop it.  His fingers curl behind your ears.  "Whatcha thinkin' about?"  
  
You sigh, giving him a weary but fond smile.  "How I'm too old to be as crazy about you as I am, and you're too young for an old man like me."  
  
"Oh, Levi," he says, and you know he's being reassuring but there is the smallest trace in his voice of fatigue, and it makes your stomach do a nauseating flip-flop.  "We've talked about this, remember?  I don't care how old you are.  That's literally not something my heart has taken into account at all.  I'm not sitting here with a scales and a notepad weighing pros and cons and waiting for the deal breaker to show up."  He keeps raking your hair back even though it won't stay against gravity.  He's watching his hands, not looking you in the eye, but he does for a moment when he grins and says, "You're not even that old, anyway."  
  
"I'm twice your age."  
  
"Still not that old.  What, you think that once you hit a certain age, you're not allowed to be a hopeless romantic anymore?"  
  
"No," you say, truthfully.  "I was thinking the opposite.  The way I'm thinking about you is…"  You lean your cheek on your propped up fist.  "It's an old people feeling."  
  
He makes a face at you.  "What, like… you wanna marry me, or something?"  
  
You avoid looking at him and shrug because technically, no, you hadn't been thinking of that precise word, but that's only because you've been running laps to keep it from catching up to you.  
  
He perceives this.  He tries to go bolt upright but can't because you're on top of him, and instead makes a kind of hilarious fish-like motion that mostly involves his head.  "You're… you wanna marry me?"  
  
"I didn't say that."  
  
"You're thinking it."  
  
"I'm not."  
  
"Well, you're thinking _something_."  
  
You think it's really ironic that the upper brass decided Eren should be allowed a bedroom and not a dank moldy cellar dungeon block now of all times, when you've already had your surgery with potentially gangrenous consequences in such a gross environment, and he hasn't been sleeping in his cell to begin with.  It's almost like no one has any idea he's sleeping with you, or something.  The notion almost makes you laugh, but you're still running from that word, and humor evades you.  At least this will make it a little easier for the two of you — you can actually use this room, instead of avoiding it like you have been his cell.  Plus, this room is on a corner and has more than one wall with windows, which warms the cockles of your little cage-fearing heart even if it makes things that much more detectible from the outside looking in.  
  
"I'm thinking," you say, staring toward a window, "that I've never thought I'd be here."  
  
He blinks his way through that one.  "Here, like… with me, or…?"  
  
"With anyone.  It literally never occurred to me to wonder what I might be missing — to think about love, let alone the kind that lasts, and spending it with someone.  I've always felt that my whole life would be a string of days exactly like the last one, and then one day I'd be dead.  When I was younger, it was surviving in the gutters.  When I joined the Corps, it was killing titans.  I never put my sights to my future because I was too caught in my present, too caught in what I was _currently_ doing to ever wonder about what I _might_ be doing, or feeling, later."  There's a tiding of magpies in a bush outside, skipping from branch to branch and chattering away over some perceived upset.  The flashings of blue behind their wings is like a heartbeat, its pulse a tattoo against your eyes.  "Never even entered my mind to wonder if I might have the luxury of being in love someday."  
  
"So all your shit's suddenly gotten real domestic and it scares you."  
  
You turn away from the argument amongst the magpies and stare down at him from inches away.  For as thick as he can be sometimes, particularly in regards to combat, he is damn perceptive when it comes to you.  
  
"Maybe you don't have to kill titans until you die.  Maybe you can actually do something with your life.  Give it some meaning."  You blink wide eyes at him.  Coming from Eren fucking Jäger, the boy who believes fighting the titans is precisely what gives his life meaning, that's almost too rich to swallow.  Maybe he senses this because he giggles and says, "Y'know, give yourself an identity outside of the war.  You are more than the sum of everything you've killed, Levi."  
  
"And who are you, outside the war?"  
  
"Me?" he says, as though the question has startled him.  Then he grins.  "I'm the Suicidal Bastard who rushes in without thinking and can't even fuckin' read.  Who else?"  
  
"Well.  Pretty sure the 'can't read' part has been scraped away from your identity," you say, trying not to laugh at him, and he ruffles your hair before smoothing it back down.  "So now what are you."  
  
"I'm a cup-dropping crybaby hopelessly in love with my childhood hero, that's who I am."  
  
He has such delicate cheekbones, so low on his face and so minimal, and it makes his eyes look huge, drawing plaintive facial expressions out of innocence.  Those eyes watch you as a thousand reactions flicker over your face.  "Such certainty," you marvel, and in the moment it takes you to realize you've said this aloud, he grins.  
  
"Sure," he says.  "Why not?  Not like I don't have a lifetime to figure it out.  If I turn out to be someone else, what's it matter?  At least I know who I am at this moment."  
  
"That makes absolutely zero sense."  
  
"I've got no problem with just _being_ ," he says, and you can't tell if he's ever going to get fed up with trying to explain this new wave existential mumbo-jumbo to some old hood rat, but… for now, you guess, he's enjoying it, and he's right — he's living in each moment as surely as you were surviving by each of yours, as if sometimes _this moment_ is all you have, but the difference is that he's actually living in it, dedicated to it, invested in it.  He's not just surviving.  He's leaving footprints.  
  
You look at him, your face guarded, and suddenly it hits you that you have no reason to have reservations in this moment.  You have nothing to fear in being candid with him.  And maybe that's exactly what he means — just _be_.  
  
"I'm not sure I'm ready for all this… these thoughts of lifetime commitment," you murmur, "even though my brain keeps wanting to have them.  See… thing is, with me just keeping my life together from moment to moment, and assuming each change means a permanent new pattern, I've just kind of… done the same with you.  And assumed that we're… that this, us, is a thing that's going to keep happening until I die."  He's watching you carefully, not willing to interrupt, but trying to figure out where you're going with this.  Honestly, so are you.  "So I… I've never sat back and thought about what I actually wanted.  Ever, not once in my life.  But… that's not living.  And I think that's what you mean.  I've just let my whole life happen to me, instead of owning it, and making plans, and taking it in the direction I want to go.  Even deciding to be with you wasn't really an active decision on my part, it was just me deciding not to fight something that was clearly bound to happen.  It's not that I chose to be with you because I wanted to.  I allowed being with you to happen because I didn't want to fight it.  I never even asked you to be with me, it just kind of happened."  His big, pretty eyes are going from listening to puzzled.  "So.  I think you're right.  I think I need to make choices and commit and actually live my life, not just let life happen to me."  
  
He nods, slowly, digesting.  "Yeah," he says, "that's exactly what I mean," but his voice is wary, because this kind of sounds like you're not happy with the way things are.  
  
But you are.  
  
Just not necessarily the _reason_ they are.  
  
And that's the part you need to change, you realize — that's the part you need to take ownership of, become an active participant in.  
  
You touch his chin, making him focus his gaze on yours.  "I've never loved anyone before, never like this, and I can't imagine not waking up with you every morning as long as I'm alive.  And I want to be with you.  As long as I possibly can, war or not, secretly a titan or not, I want to be with you.  So…"  
  
You slide off him, off the bed, and hit the floor, going to your knees as best you can with the brace keeping your ankle from bending to support your own ass.  Feeling a little stupid, but also feeling kind of giddy and even a little romantic, you fold your hands in front of you.  His face is completely puzzled now, but at least he's no longer wary, and it makes your heart flutter.  
  
"Eren Jäger," you say, and it draws him up onto an elbow, watching your face with a distinct shininess in his eyes like he might cry, and suddenly you're trying not to laugh.  "Will you be my boyfriend?"  
  
"Yes," he says, the question barely out of your mouth before his answer flies, and he's grabbing you by the arms and tugging you back into bed, and you're giggling at him, and he's holding you, your boyfriend is holding you, crushing you around the ribs and giggling into your hair and you think he might be crying and that's okay, because you will take all the time you need to make him laugh, as often as he needs it and sometimes even when he doesn't, just because you want to.  If he's the cup-dropping crybaby who rushes in without thinking, you're the diaper piss baby who takes too long to do anything and whines about doorknobs and commitment and always, fruitlessly, stupidly, tries to save people from themselves, and you're Eren Jäger's boyfriend, and really, in this moment, even if it changes later, that last part is all you feel you need to be.  
  
He rolls you onto your back and kisses lines of fire down your throat, and you realize this is why you love him — he lives his life without fear of restraint, and piece by piece, he's pulling you out of a shell you didn't even know you've been hiding in.  He's _alive_ , and he makes you come alive, and as he teases the elastic waistband down your hips and traces the track of your inguinal ligament with his tongue, you never knew alive could feel this good.  
  
He doesn't put your dick in his mouth, but that's okay, because you're not really interested in shutting him up.  
  
He's still a little clumsy with rolling the condom onto you — these things have existed for thousands of years, since the Romans, and people still can't figure out how to design them so that they are both comfortable, and not inclined to roll back up themselves once in place — and he's very unaccustomed to this angle, given you usually prefer to do all the work.  But when he lines up and pushes himself down over you, it steals your breath.  His body has strengthened and hardened since he started exercising with you, his stomach a checkerboard, his thighs layer upon layer of thick muscle, and though he still falters with his rhythm, it has nothing to do with his ease in lowering himself onto you again and again.  It has to do with him leaning back, tossing his head back to pant at the ceiling, angling himself so you nudge his prostate, and you realize — in this, too, he's _living_.  Sex with you isn't just a thing that happens sometimes; it's something he _wants_ , something he commits to, something he does to himself.  
  
You grip him by the hips and sit up, your movements so abrupt it throws him off balance and he flings his arms around your shoulders, wide-eyed, as you go to your knees and put him on his back across the foot of the bed.  
  
You rock into him, watching every reverent twitch of his face, memorizing the bite of his nails into your forearms, noting the slide of his foot along the small of your back as his toes curl into themselves.  He presses back against you, and you roll with his cadence, pushing for spots inside him that make his voice go high and weak and breathless, _Levi, ah, God, Levi._  
  
He comes before you do, though just barely, as if you'd been waiting for his release before giving yourself permission to follow, though that's not exactly it.  You're paying so much attention to him, to deliberately drawing sounds and faces and cries out of him, that you don't realize how close you are until he snaps, his entire body pinging into contractions, and you're not sure what it is that undoes you at last — a scratch down the arm, a shift of your position inside him, your name spilling from his tongue like a prayer.  But you do know that, when you've cleaned up and he's giggled at you for your continued love affair with vinegar and you're tangled in each other's arms and he's whispering "I think that was the biggest I've ever had", it doesn't matter which detail it was that made you climax.  He's the climax.  This boy under your hands, with his whispers of "man if you fuck me like that every time it might be the death of me" and his ankle lazily sliding up and down the back of your calf, this boy is the happiest you'll ever feel, the most satisfied you'll ever be.  Maybe someday, when his sister won't kill you and the taboo against it won't ruin you both, you can talk about things like marriage and other concepts that have names, but for now, in this moment, he's your definition of forever.  
  
And for once, and at last, and for the rest of your life, you're glad to be actively involved in that fact.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where you belong is by my side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.**
> 
> We have officially caught up with the anime, so for anime-only audiences who haven't read the manga: from here on out, it's Spoiler City for you. This chapter does not ease them in gently, either; it covers some pretty game-changing stuff all throughout with no coating of sugar to be found.
> 
> **PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.**

You were almost, fucking _almost_ , asleep.

At first, your tired brain confuses the knocking on the door with some kind of noise outside, but when the knocking turns into banging, it starts you out of your daze and pulls you from Eren's sleep clutches with a heavy sigh.

You pick up a pair of his sweatpants.  You're stepping on the hems, but it's easier than trying to wriggle the ankle brace back through your slacks.  You don't bother with a shirt.

Jean Kirschtein blinks back astonishment at seeing you so underdressed, swallowing hard and composing himself without looking you in the eye.

You haven't gotten a chance to observe Kirschtein in combat, but his training records and graduating statistics are excellent, and from what you've seen, you don't think he understands the purpose of dishonesty, no matter who he's talking to.  He's brazen and self-righteous, and while it might annoy you if he were in a position of power, he's not, and that just makes him incredibly entertaining.  You remember promising Eren you wouldn't invite him onto your squad, but with the headcount in your squad reduced to three — you've already posted a transfer request to Erwin for both Armin and Mikasa — you don't think that's a promise you're reasonably obligated to uphold.  Besides, he did volunteer to be Eren's decoy today, and if sticking his neck out for someone he openly dislikes isn't proof enough he's the type of soldier you want on your squad, you don't know what is.

Plus, watching them squabble will provide you with some fun, at least.  Your squad is now lacking the roles of bickering pair of teenagers, a gap left by Farlan and Isabel that you won't accept being left open.

"You need something, recruit?"

"Um," he says, and he shifts in place.  His eyes keep flicking to the deep scar that curves over your shoulder.  "We're moving out, sir.  Preliminary rendezvous and regroup at the checkpoint in Ehrmich."

You raise an eyebrow.  "We?"

"All troops present, sir."

"When?"

"Now, sir.  Orders just arrived from the commander."

Your stomach flips.  Being left out of Erwin's loop doesn't sit well with you, and he knows it, and since you're still waiting for him to return from his summons at Mitras, you're inclined to sit right the fuck where you are and let him explain himself.  "Why?"

Kirschtein shuffles from one foot to the other, and you notice for the first time the waxy paleness of his complexion, the uneasy shift of his eyes, the hollowness in his gaze.  He swallows audibly, and he looks as though he might throw up.  His voice is faint.  "Wall Rose is breached, sir."

The words hit you like a hammer to the face.

For a moment, all you can do is stand there.  Kirschtein blinks at you, blinks at your scar, blinks at you.

Then you're moving, ramming your good heel into the bed frame and yelling "Oi!", moving straight through Eren's yelp of surprise.  You step out of Eren's sweatpants and forget to give a shit about Kirschtein's poor delicate maiden sensibilities.  "Trost again?"

"No sir," he says, averting his eyes as you pull on an undershirt and start struggling into your slacks.  What a gentleman.

"Karanes?"

Eren starts to ask what's happening, but Kirschtein is quicker.  "No, sir.  It's not a gate.  The wall itself is breached, in the southwest.  Near Castle Utgard, we think.  Squads Nanaba, Gelgar, and Mike are already investigating, along with the forward surveillance units of the Garrison.  Commander's orders are to deliver Eren to the front lines once the breach is located."

Eren leaps from the bed with a swear and starts throwing on clothes, but you stop for a moment, the rolled-up leg of your slacks paused at the thickest part of your heel, and frown across the room at the darkened window.  "That doesn't make any sense."

Kirschtein steps into the room, sense of chivalry apparently forgotten.  "Why?  His titan power can plug the wall with debris and help reduce the num—"

"No, not that.  The gates are weak spots," you point out, tugging your slacks over the brace in a burst of impatience.  You hear seams pop.  "That's the whole reason the Armored and Colossal types were targeting those areas.  If they could've knocked down the walls themselves at any given area, why not just do that?  Why target the gates, where people can see them and know exactly who's responsible, if it doesn't have some advantage that overrides the importance of anonymity?"

"I always thought it was the population density," Jean muses, and you look up at him as you slide on a belt.  His brows are furrowed in consideration.  "If they're going for maximum damage, they're not gonna get it by breaking through the wall itself, since most of the wall is surrounded by woods and plains.  Why bother targeting an isolated area when they could take out an entire city at once, easy as breathing?  They wouldn't even have to guide the titans anywhere; everyone's already locked up in a cage.  Targeting gates lets them cut out huge portions of the population in a matter of minutes."

You pull on an overshirt, watching his face as you fasten the buttons.  Perceptive little fucker.  You hadn't even thought of the population factor.

"You better watch your mouth about how convenient it is to take out cities," Eren warns, his voice guttural, "before I show how convenient it is to take out a few of your teeth."

Kirschtein's face snaps from contemplation to annoyance in a blink.  "Like my city didn't get taken out too, you self-centered fuckwit."

"It didn't," Eren snaps, "thanks to me.  You can still go home, get some family cooking, see your mom.  Wanna know where _my_ mom is, horse-face?"

"Hey," you cut in, slapping his shoulder as you move past him to borrow some of his socks.  "Knock it off."  He starts to say Jean started it, but you say, "You wanna fight about whose hometown sucks most, I'll make both of you sob like little fucking babies."

"Levi, I'm not ev—"

"For the love of dog shit, Eren, there is a time and a place.  Fight later, move now."

Kirschtein complies without comment.  Eren keeps muttering under his breath.

You talk like that, but when Jean is on a different wagon for the ride to Ehrmich, you're not sure you appreciate it.  Without having someone else to channel his rage onto, Eren is left to stew in self-doubt, and Self-Doubt Eren is not an Eren that warms your heart to have around.  Self-Doubt Eren brings out Blunt Facts Levi, and you can tell he doesn't like Blunt Facts Levi because you're… well.  Too blunt.  You have to admit to yourself, even if you don't admit it to him, that the likelihood of him developing a new skill so easily and quickly seems unlikely.  But reminding him of the bare bones of what must be done, and giving him a clear goal, tends to help him clear up his doubt and focus his thoughts, so even though your harshness doesn't make anyone sunshiny and happy, it at least helps move the situation forward.  You refuse to feel bad about that.

You refuse to feel bad, too, about openly blaming your broken leg on Mikasa's fuck-up, even though you know rationally that it was a combination of factors including your own decision to act.  Whatever repose she discovered within herself a few hours ago in Eren's room, she hangs onto it now, and she responds to your provocation with staunch reassurance that it won't happen again.

You think you might be beginning to warm to her, dammit.

You also refuse to feel bad about pointing a firearm at a man of faith, even though it makes Armin give you a look that verges on disappointment.  You don't uphold that certain tacit respect for the existence of faith that everyone else seems to.  Faith apparently never helped Nick accomplish anything alcohol couldn't, anyway.

And if there _are_ titans inside the entirety of all the walls, and if he _knows_ about what secrets are keeping the walls intact and who's trying to bring them down, Pastor Nick has turned into your own personal punching bag.

Pissed as you are about a wall breach that could've been prevented if you'd been armed with the necessary information to protect it, and pissed as you are that new information keeps coming to light when you thought all you had to do for answers was get to Eren's basement, you're far more pissed about the orders relayed from Erwin:

Squad Hanji, as well as the three members of your squad (apparently he made the command decision to approve your transfer request on Mikasa and Armin, how magnanimous), are to head straight to Castle Utgard to meet all Corps and Garrison surveillance units.

But not you.

You, in temporary command of all reserve units, are to move to the military reserve station at Trost, where you are to keep Nick under guard and coordinate your next move based on the reports of the Garrison forward surveillance units.  Which boils down to:

Just wait.

Wait for news, wait for Erwin's arrival, wait for the bodies of the dead to be returned, wait while Eren is taken away from you again and you're powerless to keep him safe.

Erwin isn't even there at the station in Ehrmich, and it's all you can do to constrain your anger to taking it out on Nick.  Your bad ankle doesn't appreciate you using it as a bludgeon, let alone more than once, but you kind of don't fucking care.  Eren stops long enough on his sprint for the stables to grasp your hands tightly, give you a nod you're sure he intends to be meaningful, and say, "I'll see you in Trost, Captain," before he's mounted and gone.

"Damn," Kirschtein mutters as he climbs into the wagon beside you, and you're very pleased you don't jump and betray that he's startled you.  "I've never met someone so desperate to die."

He's at least half a head taller than you, and it puts a crick in your neck to look up at him at your side.  "Who, Eren?"

He lets out a chuckle through his nose, still staring off in the direction they'd departed, and nods.  "Who else but our own favorite Suicidal Bastard?"

The use of the nickname drums up a memory of breakfast with the new recruits of the 104th, and you remember making fun of him for it, simply latching onto anything that could serve a halfway decent excuse to test his self-control with you in front of his friends.  "Ahh," you murmur, "right."

"D'you think he even realizes that he could, like, possibly die?"

Your conversation with Eren the night before the expedition — God, was that really only four days ago? — is hazy in your memory because of the very same alcohol that had inspired you to talk in the first place, but you do remember pointing out one of you could die, or even both of you, and him practically laughing the idea away.

Dirk leaps into the driver's seat, and the wagon lurches into motion.  Nick nearly falls off the bench on his side.  Behind you, a trio of wagons bearing the reserve troops falls into line.  You're relieved Dirk seems to have a fire under his ass for setting the pace, even if he's shit at avoiding rocks in the road.

"I think he does, but I think he also has a pretty realistic grasp of how unlikely it is."

"Unlikely?"  Jean stares at you, crosses his arms, looks into the dark toward the road to Utgard, scoffs.  "How many times would he be dead right now if not for Mikasa saving him?"

"Mikasa?"  You watch his face, and it only falters a little until you say "I can think of two occasions offhand where _I_ rescued him.  When did she?" and then his jaw tightens, nostrils flaring, as he searches for an answer.  You're sort of amused because he's just fun to mess with, and even more amused because his blatant devotion to her seems to actually skew his memory of events in her favor, but mostly, you're just confused as to where he got the idea that she's saved him from anything.

"Well," he says.  "Didn't she save him from Annie?"

"When?"

"On… on the expedition."

"No, I did that."

He frowns at you.  "She's saying she did it.  Her words exactly, 'I fought Annie with Levi and I got him back.'  She's been saying it since Armin first named Annie as a suspect."

"Well, she's phrasing that awful funny, because I did that.  All she did was _this_ ," you say, holding out your busted ankle, and in the moonlight, Jean has the grace to turn an appropriate shade of pink.

"Well, didn't… she tried to bring him back to his senses at Trost, right?"

"Unsuccessfully.  From the reports I've read, Arlert is the one who actually did it."

"Well, and then she pulled him out after he sealed the gate."

"And into the mouth of a waiting titan, which I killed."

His blush burns darker.  "Oh."

"Don't get me wrong, she's an incredible fighter and her skills are extraordinary; I've seen her in action, I know firsthand.  She's a quick thinker and she's ruthless.  But I think you're letting your feelings cloud your perception of the truth."

"Oh," he says again, and he sniffs a little.  You almost want to ruffle his hair and tell him he's not stupid or anything, it's okay, everyone has a crush sometimes, but you think that would startle him more than reassure him, and besides, you have no idea when he last washed his hair.  He sniffs himself upright and says in a firmer tone, "But, as if Eren doesn't?"

"No, I think his perception of things is pretty spot on, actually."

"Wh—"

"Granted, his overzealousness makes him difficult to take seriously, but he's really not wrong — he's demonstrated a pretty good track record of having limits beyond what most people can handle."

"Because of that titan power!"  He's got his nerve behind him again.  Good; you like him better that way.  "How many times over would he have died if he didn't have that?"

"That's irrelevant.  He _does_ have it, and that changes his mortality, which makes his exaggerated view of the unlikelihood of his death realistic, not inflated."

"But you just said you've saved his life twice!"

"At Trost, he relented because the Corps had returned, and he knew it was safe to step down.  He was acting within reasonable understanding of his own limitations.  And as for Annie, who's to say anyone needed to save him from her?  He could've transformed inside her mouth and blown her right out of her own pretty little skinless neck."

He sighs, staring into the darkness at nothing, and shakes his head a little.  "You're right, but you're also just saying this to get under my skin."

Jean's bluntness is a quality too rare in soldiers these days, all of them preferring to hide their true opinions in favor of kissing ass or saving face, or both.  Even Erwin isn't really honest about… well, anything, really.  He tells people exactly what they want to hear to get them to follow his direction and think it's their own idea.  At least he's honest enough to have stopped acting like he isn't using that tactic on you; he knows that you're already wise to it, and trying to disguise it anyway won't win him brownie points.  He knows, when he points out how things are in your favor, that you're aware he's doing it to push you toward his goals.  But he also knows you'll continue to follow his lead because he's not wrong about the outcome being in your favor, so he keeps doing it, though transparently.

But Jean?

You don't think he understands the point of manipulation, of telling people what they want to hear so they'll act in a way he'd deem favorable, and you can't admire him enough for that.

You wonder if Jean would fall for Erwin's bullshit.

"Of course.  I'm trying to get you to think critically, with your knowledge and experience, not just with your love and fear.  Eren understands that people are often capable of far more than they think they are, and if everyone only ever sticks to their comfort zones and sits around fondling themselves, nothing will ever get done.  And who are we to say he's wrong?"

"So you think everyone should be a Suicidal Bastard?"

"I think everyone should be a little more ambitious and a little less prone to wait for someone else to take action."  You give him a small smile, then it dawns on you that he's sitting here in a wagon, not riding off to Utgard, and you frown.  "And speaking of taking action, why the hell aren't you out there with Hanji's unit?"

He shrugs.  "Not part of hi— he— …their squad.  No squad equals no orders, equals I get defaulted to the reserve units."  He blinks into the darkness for a moment, then looks down at you and says, "Is Major Hanji a woman or a man?"

"That," you say, "depends entirely on who you ask."

He looks out toward Hanji's back, long since gone into the dark, and says, "What's that supposed to mean."

"It means exactly what it sounds like," you say, pulling the revolver from your inner coat pocket.  Jean leans away a touch, but you're just fidgeting; you check the chamber and return it to your coat.  "To me, she strikes me closest to being a woman, and I think Eren agrees.  Moblit calls her a man.  Erwin uses neutral pronouns.  Mike tends to switch it up every time she comes up in conversation.  Depends on what she smells like at the moment, I guess."

"So… what would Hanji call hers— …themselves?"

"Hanji is nonpartisan on that.  She insists everything is right."  You catch Nick staring at your chest.  It might be your imagination, but his face has blanched a little.  "I think she thinks of it as a game, personally.  Not that she's faking her gender identity or anything, but that it has the side effect of fucking with people.  And she loves fucking with people."

"Oh."

"What do you think Hanji's gender is?"

His face goes blank with thought, and he says "I don't know" as he stares around aimlessly.  He shrugs his cloak on tighter.  "What've they got going on, like… down th—"

Your memory of Hanji asking Eren about your dick hasn't faded, and a small childish part of you still kind of wants a little bit of payback for it, but this is a very personal question.  Your voice goes hard.  "You realize that has about as much to do with a person's gender identity as a fish fart on bread has to do with time travel."

"I know, I know."

"Then why'd you ask?"

"I… I don't know."

His face is very red.  He stares into the dark, toward the back of the girl he loves, and you can't say you blame him.

"So you don't have a squad?"

The question draws his gaze down to you, and it takes him a moment to blink your words into making sense in his brain.  "Oh.  No, sir."

"Wanna be on mine?"

His brows furrow somewhere between confusion and alarm.  "Is… are you serious?"

"Do I appear to be in a joking mood?"

Your resting bitch face pays off, and Jean looks away quickly.  "No sir.  It's just… I thought you said I was never gonna be on your squad."

"I was kidding about that.  I even said as much.  Do you have some kind of selective memory problem?"

He ignores your jab; your expectations soar.  "Don't think Eren will be any less inclined to hold you to it."

"And don't you think that would piss him off something awful?"

He opens his mouth, stares unseeingly at the floor of the wagon, closes his mouth.  He glances sidelong at you, and when he sees the grin you're barely concealing, his own breaks out as well, all teeth and dimples and giddy childlike wonder.  "I do believe it would, sir."  Then his face goes serious.  "But… why?  Why me?  I haven't don—"

"Because I like your graduating stats, I like your honesty, and I like that you expressed clear interest in joining the MP in some misguided attempt to save your own ass and yet you're here anyway."

He goes pink around the ears again.  His voice is quiet.  "I didn't think you knew about that."

"Shadis made a note.  Made lots of notes.  Not the least of which being that you should've been in the top five and the only reason he gave the rank to Eren is because of that same confidence you find so irritating."  He wrings his hands in his lap, his ears burning hot, and you ask, "Why _are_ you here?"

He gives a crooked smile.  "Cause Eren's a fuckin' firebrand is why."

"True, but I don't believe his rants would've worked on you.  You don't seem like the type to be swayed or influenced by others' opinions.  You're too independent for that, and I admire that."

He seems to have lost his ability to pull coherent sentences out of his brain.  His mouth flaps open like a fish.

"You're a good soldier, Kirschtein, and a good man.  But what humanity needs from you is to trust your teammates — trust them so well you can read what they're going to do without even asking, and let them read you the same way.  You think you can do that?"

He blinks for a moment.  Then he steels himself, puffs his chest, and looks you in the eye.  "I can."

You know.  You give him a smile.  "Then welcome to the Special Operations Squad."  He starts to smile back, but when you say "Your first orders," his face goes stony and all business.  What a responsible little good boy.  "Are to keep a close eye on Nick, here."  You kick your good ankle toward the pastor and elbow Jean, who looks appropriately surprised.

"Are you going to… not be able to do that, sir?"

"Is it your job to question my actions?"

He swallows hard, his eyes widening a touch.  "No sir, I didn't m—"

"I'm fucking with you," you say, nudging a foot at his ankles.  He doesn't seem to know what to make of this.  "I'm taking a nap.  You wanna trade shifts with me 'til we get there?"  He flaps his mouth once or twice and blinks at you, and you say, "Don't be shy, soldier."  He thinks about it for a moment, then shakes his head, carefully shifting his weight onto Nick's bench.

"No, I'm… I'm good."

"You sure?"

He nods as he settles in.  "Yeah."

"Then I'll see you in the morning, Sunshine."

"Yessir."

You flop back onto the bench, rolling to face the wall, and talk over your shoulder.  "Hopefully if we're about to become titan chow in our sleep, Eren Fucking Jäger will arise from the blue and rescue our sorry damsel asses."

You're pretty sure you hear him laugh.  "Fingers crossed for Eren Fucking Jäger."

You don't really sleep, just drift a little, and Dirk's urgent pace gets you to Trost as dawn breaks.  The custodians at the reserve station aren't even up and cooking yet.  For the best, probably — it's been since yesterday morning that you've eaten, but you don't think you could force anything down your mouth at the moment.  Your stomach is rolling with unrest.  Granted, the entire trip had been in the dark, but… shouldn't you have seen some evidence of titan activity by now, if you're as close to the breach as reports say you are?

You move to the barracks, dragging Nick with you, and tell him it's in everyone's best interest to be as rested as possible when the shit hits the fan.  You're amazed at how calm and soft your voice sounds.  Maybe you're just too tired to be angry anymore.

Your attempt at sleep is as fruitless in the barracks as it had been in the wagon.  It feels so strange trying to sleep in a bed by yourself.  It doesn't help that Jean and Nick don't snore.

Somewhere around mid-morning, when you're all going by the kitchen pass-through to collect breakfast, the churning starts in your stomach.  That sense of unrest you'd felt in the caravan has become a deep, aching unease you can't shake or explain.  You're not much one to believe in signs or premonitions, but somehow, you have a powerful feeling that something's gone wrong.

You duck out of line with nothing more than tea.  It's a breakfast blend too rich in Assam, and it's been oversteeped, but it'll do.  Maybe if you can get the ball rolling on a halfway decent shit, it'll loosen up the nausea of wariness in your gut.

It does its job in a purely biological sense — why does this place only have like, half ply toilet paper, what the hell kind of poophands people live here — but the churning unease hasn't abated by the time Erwin arrives at last from Mitras.  You're as awake as you're going to get, as showered as you're going to get with this shitty water pressure, and everyone else as fed as they're going to get, when he rides through the side doors and chooses an open stall near the back.  He doesn't look nearly miserable enough for your liking, and you don't bother attempting to conceal any of the venom in your stare as he strolls toward you and Nick, sitting in the wagon and waiting to move out at his order, which he doesn't seem ready to give.

He leans on the wagon frame next to you, and you try to incinerate him with your stare.

"How's it going?"

"Fan fucking tastic."

"Good.  Sorry to put you on babysitting duty," he jokes, the deep easy cadence of his voice somehow managing to not sound insulting, and he even winks at Nick for good measure.  The pastor actually smiles in response.

"Are you really?"

"Really what?"

"Sorry."

He meets your gaze, and damn him, he doesn't flinch.  "I am.  I know you'd rather be on the front lines.  But with your leg trussed up and unable to bend at the ankle, you can't support maneuver gear, which mea—"

"Why am I _really_ here?"

He blinks.  "I'm not sure what you mean."

"Yes you are.  You're a spectacular liar even under the worst of circumstances, but I know the flavor of bullshit sandwich when it's shoved in my mouth like a dick on Christmas."  Nick fidgets in his seat.  Erwin glances toward him.  You ignore it.  "I'm the best titan killer you've got.  You know I'm skilled enough to use gear with only partial use of one foot.  If there's some kind of colossal goatfuck happening out there, why am I — your top killer, your most capable and innovative fighter, and Humanity's Strongest Soldier — sitting in horse shit heaven with a thumb up my ass?"

He stares at you long and hard, and you don't flinch either.  You know he'd like to make a heavily coded comment about saying such things in front of soldiers and civilians alike, but as sure as you are of his anger at you for it, you're equally sure he knows you've already weighed the consequences and judged them insignificant, so him trying to coach you about it would be pointless.  Him trying to coach you about anything is pretty pointless, really, and as much as it frustrates him that you can't be controlled or contained, you are undoubtedly far and away the best he's got, and your skill is more valuable than the problematic nature your attitude can pose.  He knew that six years ago, when he convinced you to enlist for real, and he knows it hasn't changed even microscopically after all this time.

You're pretty sure he kind of hates you for it.

You don't care.

He gives Nick one more sideways glance before he meets your eyes and says, without blinking, "Because I don't think there is a breach."

"That's what I thought you'd say."

"I think there's some kind of fluke that involves a controlled, small number of titans, and I don't think the wall has anything to do with it."

You admit to yourself you've stopped thinking so either; all's been too quiet on the western front.  When Maria was breached, it was like unstoppering a keg, and the flow of titans didn't slow for days.  Trost looked the same when you'd arrived.  You know there were confirmed sightings yesterday, but this is too different.

You wonder if this is the reason for the churning sense of unease, but as soon as the question enters your mind, you know it's not.  Something else is afoot.

"How can there be titans inside the walls without a breach?"

He shakes his head, and his gaze falls to your chest, to the bulge of the revolver hidden there.  "I'm not sure, but we're going to find out, and soon, I expect."  He meets your eyes again.  "Which is why I need you here, resting up and preparing for what's yet to come, not unreachable and aggravating your injury.  You're not infallible, and once you start using it, there's a limit to how much you'll be able to take.  I'll need you to be in the top shape you can be in when the situation gets worse."

There's a limited amount of scenarios that could qualify as worse.  "You think there's going to be a repeat."

"It hit in the middle of nowhere for a reason, to divide us, spread us thin.  It's going to strike again, harder, and closer to home, and I need you closest to the epicenter when it does."

This, you can accept as a valid reason to hold you back, but not good enough to separate you from Eren.  "Why send the little shit out there, then?  Wouldn't you need all the strongest weapons at your disposal at ground zero?"

"They're watching; we can be sure of that.  And if we don't act in a predictable manner, we'll give away that we know what's coming, and they'll change course.  I have an excuse to hold you back, thanks to your injury.  I have no reason not to send Eren."

"Erwin," you say, and he holds your gaze.  You drop your voice low.  "What the fuck is really happening out there?"

He shakes his head slowly.  "You know everything I do.  I've been riding all night to get from the capital to here.  I haven't gotten any more news on the way."  You keep staring at him, and he says, "You've got a bad feeling too, huh?"

You nod, slowly and minutely, and he returns it.

"I'm honestly not so sure the worst is yet to come.  Part of me feels like it's already happened."

You're highly inclined to agree.  "Then why the _fuck_ am I still here?"

"Because I don't know where to send you, and even if I did… frankly—"

"You don't think I'm capable enough with this injury to not get killed."

His gaze falls to your ankle, and you want to break his fucking nose.  "I don't know.  But I can't risk it.  If there is some kind of uproar happening out there, I can't lose you in it.  Whatever this is, it's not the end.  And when the end comes, I'll need you.  Not now.  Not like this."

Nick is looking between you with such speed it's as if he's trying to get his eyes to point in two directions at once.  "What are you talking about?  What do you mean, there's no breach?  How is that possible?  Who's watching?  What more is coming?"

Erwin directs the full weight of his gaze on Nick, and Nick does flinch.  He's not doing it to frighten or intimidate, he's just letting the mask slip, but most people don't even realize Erwin is wearing layer upon layer of masks and seeing him at his rawest scares them, makes Nick shrink back in his seat and grip the bench with knuckles that turn white.

He says, "We'll get to the bottom of it," and his voice is sincere and loaded with promise.

All Nick can do is nod.

By the time he returns his gaze to you, the mask is back in place, even though he knows when it comes to you it doesn't need to be.  Force of habit is a powerful thing.  "I need to debrief General Pixis," he says, his voice light and easy.  "I'll be back afterward, in about half an hour I think.  Where to find him, though, since the pub was empty… well, if I know him, he's probably drunk on the wall somewhere," he muses, a trace of fond laughter in his voice, and he turns away.  He starts to stride off, but he turns back, and he walks backward as he calls, "Have you actually _had_ such a thing in your mouth on Christmas?"

You stare at him the way Jean had stared at you when you'd kicked at his ankles last night.  "How about you mind your own business."

He laughs outright and faces forward again, waving lazily over his shoulder as he goes.

You wonder what kind of soul a man would have to have in order to lie as easily as Erwin Smith.

"Are there really no titans coming?"

You have to lean an arm on the back of the wagon and twist to get a good look at Jean.  He's sitting on a crate behind you, polishing spare buttons, something you've literally never seen anyone but you doing.  You feel a sudden rush of affection for him.  You're pretty sure his question is mostly aimed for you, but he's not looking at you, staring unseeingly at his hands in front of him as they move mechanically.

Dirk stands up from the crate beside him, stretching for the rafters.  "Seems not," he says in reply, his voice strained from the stretch.  "I thought it all seemed a little too calm…"

Jean doesn't have anything to say to Dirk in response to that.  His fingers swirl over the linen with practiced ease, but he doesn't seem to be paying a great deal of attention to that, either, his gaze unfocused.  His murmur almost doesn't carry.  "They weren't even armed… I wonder if they're still alive…"

You've been putting all your effort toward not thinking about it.

So when an MP demands to know where all the action is, you kind of take it out on him a little.  Just like the fucking Military Police Brigade to never get involved, never actually take a stand and put their necks out, yet talk a load of shit as if they _would've_ done something, as if it wasn't their own decision to stand back like a bunch of fucking cowards.  You notice Jean glance up at you a few times, but you don't suspect he's trying to catch your eye, so you don't give it to him.

You don't have long to torture the poor MP, though, because a man in a Garrison jacket bursts into the stable, screaming that the forward surveillance team has returned, Pixis, where's Pixis.  Jean looks up and catches you watching him.  You hold his gaze.

"Get Erwin."

He nods, stuffing the buttons in his pocket, and darts for the exit, gear triggers already in hand.

Pixis appears at the front doors of the stable in record time.  You suppose he can't be too drunk, then.  He kneels across from the messenger from the forward unit, collapsed on the dirt floor and heaving for breath.  "Things are worse than we predicted," the messenger says, his voice shaky even without the intermittent gasps for air, and Erwin, standing behind Pixis, watches him with a quiet calm.

"What happened?" he says, his voice low.

Pixis adds, "Where's the breach?"

"There…"  The messenger rocks back on his heels, swallowing hard and shaking his head as though he's still having trouble believing it, and you know exactly what he's about to say.  "There is no breach."

Pixis looks shocked.  Erwin looks solemn.  One of the MP's blurts out, "What do you mean, there's no breach?"

"There's no breach," the messenger repeats, his words firmer this time.  He seems to be getting his breath back.  "Both forward units of the Garrison met in the middle, having encountered no titans.  No breach.  No flaws, no holes, no irregularities of any kind.  Not a crack.  We met with the Survey Corps on top of the wall at Castle Utgard."

Erwin's voice is level.  "This doesn't sound worse than expected, soldier."

"It wasn't, until we met with the Survey Corps!" the man cries, and the trembling is back in his voice.  "When we met with the Corps units, the situation turned into an emergency!  There were many recruits from the 104th who were unequipped, straight out of quarantine, and among them, three of them…"  He has to pause to catch his breath again, and you want to break his neck.  "Were… _titans!"_

The building is completely silent for a moment.

Then the churning tension in you starts to bubble up and overflow from Jean, and you let him explode, because it's probably far safer for him to lose control than for you.

"Wh… what do you— _three?_   In the 104th?  What unit?  _Who?!"_   He starts to lunge forward, an arm reaching for the messenger's collar, and he's screeching, "How di—" but Erwin throws an arm out to bar him where he stands.

"Wait," he says, and Jean restrains himself, his teeth clenched and every bone shaking.  You wonder if he'll shove Erwin aside and demand names, but he's a good boy, and he doesn't.  To the messenger, Erwin says, "What happened."

The messenger seems to have forgotten he's supposed to be reporting to his own commander, not to Erwin, but Pixis is seemingly lost in thought, his face stunned.  "One of them revealed herself in the early hours this morning, when she transformed as a last resort to save her comrades.  She was in deep rehabilitative sleep when we arrived.  But within minutes of our arrival… two of them, the other two, transformed as well."

Erwin's voice is gentle, like coaxing a child into admitting who kicked the ball into the window.  "And?"

"It was… they were the Colossal and Armored Titans, sir."

The words stun you like a bullet to the chest through Kevlar, enough to rob you of any words you could've formed, but not Jean.  His voice is weak, but there.  "Who… who were they?"

The messenger's eyes flick from Jean to Erwin, and when Erwin doesn't belay the question, the messenger responds.

At his words, Jean actually staggers backward, but you can't move.

You barely remember Hoover, just enough for a vague recollection of a hunch-shouldered boy with a face like a bloodhound and a predisposition to sweating all over the damn place, but Reiner, you remember quite clearly.  Charismatic, big-brotherly type.  Absolutely massive.  Charming smile.  Huge, unabashed, blatant crush on your boyfriend.  And they're the titans who nearly destroyed this place, Jean's home, who destroyed Eren's home and murdered his mother, who took all of Maria… and they were right here, under your nose.  You've been drunk with them, you've made jokes with them, you've played card games with them.  You know Eren trusts them absolutely, so completely he couldn't even trust your analysis of Reiner's advances toward him, so much that he reportedly had trouble shifting to fight Annie Leonhardt even after witnessing her transform seconds before.  And on the coattails of that thought is the sudden, shocking realization, like a cattle prod to the face, that the Armored and Colossal Titans are undoubtedly working with the same people as the Female Titan, who sought to kidnap Eren.  He trusted them, he trusted one of them over you, and all this time, they've been hiding their murder of his family and conspiring to kill him too.

You've been abandoned by your would-be father, you've been duped into following a false conspiracy by the very person you were conspiring against, you've seen the only family you've known killed for a higher purpose that turned out to be a decoy, and the familiar dizziness of betrayal from all those moments and more hits you all at once, like a cannon thrown from the wall and dropped on top of you.  You feel as though a curtain is slowly lowering around you, cutting you off from the emotions in the room and the situation unfolding before you, and you think you can hear the roar of a factory in your ears.

Dimly, Erwin's voice floats through the curtain.  "What happened when they were found out?"

"The Corps engaged with them.  The Armored Titan took Eren Jäger—" the name pierces the curtain of haziness, throws it wide open, brings everything into sharp clarity again "—in his hand, and leapt over the wall with him.  Jäger transformed into a titan, and engaged the Armored Titan in combat."

Oh.

Oh, no.

If they were trying to abduct him, then he had no choice but to fight back, but it couldn't have gone well.  You've seen him fight Reiner, seen him throw that grown-ass man around like a doll, but his titan couldn't do shit against Annie's armor.

And suddenly, you know what happened.

This is it, this is the source of the churning unease, and it's become a volcano threatening to erupt from you and it feels a lot like vomit.  It spurs you into motion, and suddenly you're pushing past the MP's and moving back to the wagon, the Garrison messenger's voice floating behind you.

"The Corps tried to engage the Colossal Titan, but the heat was too much.  And then, when it seemed Jäger's titan might actually win, the Colossal Titan threw itself from the wall on top of him.  They didn't even seem to be interested in any of us.  It all happened very fast."  He swallows hard, tries to quell his shaking.  "By the time the Garrison was able to organize and attempt to join in the conflict, it was already over."

"And the results?"

"Four losses.  Many wounded, few severely.  Burns, mostly, some third degree."

You mount the wagon, shushing Nick's questions with a noise that almost sounds inhuman as you open the bench and yank your bag out of it.  The voice you hear pushing for the most important piece of information is Jean's, not Erwin's, because he already knows the answer as well as you do.

"And Eren?"

You step out of your shoes and wrestle your boots out of your bag.  Your harness lies waiting beneath them.

The messenger's voice shakes so badly you can barely understand him.  "They took him."

The whisper of you peeling out of your jacket is the loudest noise in the room.

And then Jean's voice is a roar in the silence: "Why are you HERE and not OUT THERE GETTING HIM BACK!"

"We couldn't!" the messenger cries, the sobs apparent in his voice.  The arch padding doesn't want to slide over the brace, so you plop down beside Nick and untie it.  "We didn't have lifts, we can't get horses over the wall!  Captain Hannes sent me to be debriefed, and then to get lifts, and combat supplies for all unarmed troops, and medical supplies for treating the wounded, and to bring the full fury of the Survey Corps back with me!"

The swelling in your ankle has gone down considerably, but the arch padding is still a tight fit.  You could lace up the brace extra tight as a compression countermeasure.  You know, though, that you're never going to fit the brace into a boot.

There's a gauze wrap in your bag.

Wrapping it tight enough to compress the swelling out might be dangerous, but it'll keep it fairly immobilized, and that's good enough for you.

Erwin's voice is a shock of calm in the rolling boil of tension in the room.  "Then that's exactly what we'll give them.  Survey Corps, all reserve units mobilize immediately."

There's a heartbeat of silence, and then Pixis has snapped to his senses and is shouting orders for Garrison units and disbursal of supplies, and the room erupts into motion.  Socks are going to make the boots a hell of a challenge, but even so, you can't force yourself to go without them; the thought alone makes you gag.  You pull the harness up to your waist, tightening the thigh straps, and praise your past self for being a genius and putting on black jeans this morning instead of slacks.  The highest ranking MP officer whose name you've forgotten is shouting orders for the Brigade to mobilize, our time has come to prove why we're all the top graduates, we get to see some action at last, blah blah, as if they didn't put themselves out of the line of fire deliberately in the first place.  In the midst of it all, you hear Erwin say, "Jean, you're with me."

"No, Erwin," you call to him, threading the belt you're already wearing.  "He's with me."

At last, he notices what you're up to, and you've already pulled the straps over your shoulders by the time his strides bring him to the cart.  "Levi," he says.  "What are you doing."

"He's on my squad, so he's with me.  I'll put in a transfer request later.  Kinda don't have a fucking minute right now."

"No," he says, and he sounds tired.  "I mean what are you doing, right now.  With your gear."

You pause in the midst of buckling the chest straps and stare at him, confused.  "What's it look like I'm doing.  I'm mobilizing.  Immediately."

"I said reserve units.  You're not a reserve unit."

An anchor drops in your gut.  Oh fuck no, he is not going to try to pull this bullshit.  You level him with a look that contains the full weight of the anger you will let loose upon him if he tries to fuck with you right now.  "You also said you were saving me for when the shit hit the fan.  I'd say losing Eren to the Colossal Fucking Titan is about as much shit as could possibly hit any collective number of fans."

"I said if it's already gone bad, I can't lose you in the mayhem."

"You sai—"

"I said I'd need you in the end, and this is _not_ the end."

"How the fuck is this not the end?"

"These guys aren't in charge of anything.  They're just lackeys.  There are so many questions we don't have answers to, and leaders of enemy forces we haven't met.  This isn't the end.  It's the beginning."

You tighten the abdominal straps without breaking his gaze.  "Has it occurred to you the forces of the universe might not give a shit if you've got all your answers before it decides to rain Hell on us like piss from a racehorse?"

"Hell, we can take.  We've dealt with that place before.  Levi, stop," he says as you sit and tug a boot on your good leg.

"Make me," you grumble, and you wriggle your foot into the left boot.  The gauze makes it a tight fit, but that'll just keep it all the more immobile, and you meet Erwin's stare with a challenging one of your own.

"You're not coming."

You stuff your loafers and hastily folded jacket into your bag.  "The fuck I'm not."

"That's not braced safely, it's not wrapped safely, and it's going to get you killed when it doesn't work the way you're used to."

You pull out your uniform jacket, shake it unfolded.  "I'm used to fighting for my life, it'll be no different."

"You're going to lose that foot by nightfall if you don't loosen up the blood flow."

"I don't give a shit.  As long as I get him back, I don't even need this foot, I can—"

"LEVI."

His voice is a burst of thunder, and Jean jumps.  Your heart thuds on your ribcage, and you're not proud of it because you're not scared of him, but all your brain can focus on is that even with you in the wagon and him on the ground he's much bigger than you and he's never, _never_ , yelled at you.  He's never yelled at anyone.  He shouts, sure, raises his voice and his tone when he's talking about saving humanity and the importance of offering our hearts, but that's a shout of passion, not anger.  He doesn't get angry.  Until this moment, you weren't sure he even _could_.

He speaks again, and his voice is back to normal, that vocal mask strapped right back in place, but there's a rumble behind it, a threat of more thunder to come.  "Think about what you just said," he says.  "You're not thinking past this moment.  You're not considering that, when we bring him back, it will mean the war will have entered a new phase where we will be fighting people, human beings, not titans, and you're the only one among us prepared to do that.  You're not considering that, when we bring him back, you will be the face of the revolution.  Humanity can't survive without you leading us, doing things only you can do.  And you can't do that as an amputee.  You especially can't do it if you're dead."

You stare at him, and after a moment, you realize you're shaking.

He understands strategy.  You don't.  You understand fear, and anger, and responsibility, but when you knock over a domino, you can't see what it will do to the domino next in line.

"If you're not making rational decisions right now, safe in this barn, you won't be making rational decisions out there on the front lines when emotions run high.  And if that injury wasn't enough to get you killed, being out of your right mind will definitely do the job.  You can't help Eren if you're dead, either."

He understands how moves will be met with countermoves, and which moves the opposition will be expecting in return, and every move he makes is calculated in response to a reaction ten or twenty steps down the road.

He can beat anyone at chess in five moves.

You've never even won a game.

"You asked me if I'm sorry, and I am.  I know where you want to be, but you have to stay here.  You have to."

You grip your jacket in tight fistfuls, if only for a place to direct the shaking.  "He can't beat them," you say, and your voice shakes too, shaking your head along with it.  "He can't."

"He beat Annie."

"He had help."

"And he will again.  I promise you, Levi, I will bring him back."

There's a stinging in your eyes, and that's what breaks you.

You remember the last time you cried.

You were twelve years old and your would-be father had abandoned you at the height of your awakening, and you cried because you couldn't understand why, how the world could let you feel so powerful and then snatch it away in the same breath, and you've spent every day ever since convincing yourself it was because you didn't need him anymore, you drove him away, you broke free, and you've never cried again, never allowed yourself to be so weak, to let anything ever again make you powerless.

Your hands gripping the jacket go quite still.

"You'd better."

"I will," he assures you firmly, "believe that.  I understand what humanity stands to lose without him."

"I don't give a shit about that," you say, and your voice is perfectly level.  "I don't give a shit what your motives are, or what bullshit you'll spoon feed to your flunkies to make them follow you, I don't care.  I _know_ that you are going to bring him back and deliver him to me alive and whole or I will, I swear, finish the task I set out to complete six years ago and no force _imaginable_ will stop me."

He holds your gaze, and something in there clicks.  You see a light go on behind his eyes.

"I will."

"Don't.  Don't stand there and try to reassure me with hollow promises like a crying mother, don't you dare.  This is not me begging you for an answer and you delivering one.  This is _you_ begging _me_ to stand down and me giving you an ultimatum.  Don't tell me you _will_.  You'd _better_.  And if you _don't_ , I will cut your fucking head off.  And I will move on to the next person who could have saved him, and the next, and the next, and they will have to kill me to stop me."

"I und—"

"I was raised by Kenny the Ripper, Erwin.  I've been groomed for this eventuality my whole life.  Titans will be the last of the military's worries."

"I know," he says, and the mask is gone.  "I know you were.  And I know how very close we nearly came to discovering that eventuality in Stohess."  He holds out a hand to you.  You stare at it.  "I won't make you promises, because it will sound like an attempt at pacification, and if I incur that wrath, I will have deserved it, and I have no intention of pacifying it.  But I will make you a deal."  You glance at his face, at his hand, and you reach out and grasp it.  His fingers are unyielding around yours, as unyielding as the look on his face.  "Twelve hours."

You understand his meaning, and you nod.  "Either those brats are fucking dead, or—"

"Twelve hours," he says, and he nods back.  "Be ready."

"I already am," you say, and you release his hand.

He walks away, striding toward his horse without another word.  You watch him go until your periphery registers there's someone still standing in his spot, and your gaze returns to the person directly in front of you.

It's Jean, who you'd nearly forgotten is someone who exists, and he looks like he's just taken one dry.  You'd all but forgotten anyone else could hear you, and you remember with an internal curse at yourself that Pastor Nick just heard you explicitly threaten the lives of everyone in this room and then some, and you sigh that worry away because if it comes to it, you won't have room in your heart to fucking care.  Jean fidgets his right hand, clenching his fist and releasing it over and over.

"So… can I go with him, Captain?"

You stare at him for a moment, watching his fist clench.  And then a giggle erupts from you, and you're not sure where it came from, and the absurdity makes more giggles burst forth, and then you're standing there chuckling to yourself and you don't even know why.  After the horrifying exchange he just witnessed, the first and primary concern on his tongue is whether he's allowed to go to war.

"You're such a painfully honest person, Jean."

He swallows hard and blinks at the ground.  His mouth opens, but you're faster.

"I like you."

He looks up again and meets your gaze.  "Sir?"

"Tell Erwin I'm giving him control of my squad," you say, "for now.  So yes, you can go with him.  Have yourself some fun."

He nods, but he doesn't leave.  He glances around, like he's debating whether to say something, and after chewing on the inside of his cheek for a moment, he says, "Just like Suicidal Bastard to get himself caught, huh?"

You're not sure if he's trying to be funny, but you're pretty sure he's not trying to piss you off, so you nod, letting out another short chuckle.  "Yeah… it is.  Doesn't seem like he had much choice in the matter this time, though."

"No," Jean says, "that's fair.  I would've fought back too, in his place, I think."  This surprises you, and you tilt your head at him.  He doesn't seem to notice, and extends his hand for you as Erwin had done.  His grip is far less viselike, but still firm.  "I'll bring your boyfriend back, Captain."

It's a cryptic remark, and it makes you tilt your head further.

He doesn't seem to notice this, either.  "And I'll cut Reiner's dick off for ya.  Serves him right, trying to flirt with him right in front of you."  You nod slowly, sure your face is doing something incredible in your bemusement, and let him release your hand.  At last, he notices the cant of your head, and he says, "What?  Not like it won't grow back, right?"

You step back, enough that you have space to swing your bag over your shoulder, and you mutter, "Wish it wouldn't."

Jean chuckles through his nose as he turns away.  "Can't blame ya."

You notice as he trots over to his horse that he's got his right fist clenched again.

You wonder whether you should grab Eren's trunk, too, and after a moment's consideration, you heft it out of the bench.  You escort Nick back inside and instruct him to stay within this building.  He assures you he's got no intention of leaving without making sure you'll be able to get your answers from someone, but you cut him off.  "Spoiler alert: we're not worried about you trying to cut and run.  We're worried about other wallists coming for you to keep your mouth shut.  Your quarantine isn't a matter of imprisonment.  It's for your protection."

His face, if possible after the conversation he's just witnessed, goes even paler.

You take your and Eren's luggage to a private room on the top floor.  You've got a good view of the entrance to the stables from here.

Taking off the maneuver gear and getting back into loose clothes is a task you don't want to admit aches as much as it does.  When you unwrap your ankle, it's already an unnatural shade of yellow, and it throbs in relief.  You let out a heavy sigh.  When Erwin's right, damn him, he's right.  The brace actually feels good, laced up and back in place over a nice clean dry sock.

The room is still too silent, the bed still too cold, but you manage to legitimately fall sleep for once, even if it's in fits and spurts.

It's only been nine hours when you consent to giving up, and sure enough, you find the stables dark and empty.

You've missed lunch and dinner, and your stomach gives a powerful lurch in protest at being denied for going on two days.

Didn't Erwin mention a pub nearby?

It's only a little ways down the street, and you can see the station from the front door.  It's a warm place with warm food, not nearly as seedy and tense as the outlets that pass for pubs in the underground, and with a little whiskey on your side, the whole thing's got you jumpy.  The drink was supposed to settle your nerves from waiting, but dammit, you're not used to hospitality.  When the voice says your name, your first instinct is to reach for a switchblade you no longer carry on you, and you stop your hand with little more than a twitch.

"Hey, that _is_ you!  Levi!"

After a moment's thought, you realize the voice is familiar, though drink has lent it a bounce it doesn't normally have in your presence.  You still recognize it easily; the gruff smoker's cadence of Nile Dawk is hard to mistake, regardless of circumstance.

A whiff of bitter cigarette smoke hails his presence as he plops into a stool on your right, though he's smart enough to leave one between you.  "Not like you to socialize," he muses.

The last time you saw Nile, it was yesterday morning in Stohess, as he casually demanded that you hand Eren over to him so they could shoot him and be done with it.  Easy as asking a waitress what's on the dessert menu.  He'd even been picking at his nails until the explosions had started.  The roar, which you'd recognized too easily as being Eren's bellow of rage, had damn near made him soil himself, and you'd only refrained from laughing at him because the entire rest of your being had burned to be there with Eren, protecting him from the beast that had defeated him so brutally just days ago and from his own lack of self-control.  In hindsight, though, it had been pretty hilarious — _oh, so_ now _you appreciate his power, huh Nile?  Still think you can kill him?_

You let out a sigh.  The universe must really fucking hate you to put Nile Fucking Dawk in front of you after that confrontation with Erwin this morning and expect you to behave yourself.  You throw an acidic glare in his general direction, enough that he'll see it but sparing yourself having to look at him.  "Do I appear to be socializing?"

"You've ventured outside whatever hovel you hibernate in when you're not forced into daylight by direct, non-negotiable orders, so yeah, I'd call that as close to socializing as you get.  How come you're not out there with 'em?"

Your abused ankle twinges in response.  He asks you the question out of sheer small talk, not really caring for the answer, waving a bartender over even as the tail of the sentence rolls off his tongue.

"Wow," you respond, and your voice has taken a tone of genuine amazement.  He blinks at you as if to say, _wow what?_ , and you shake your head at him.  "You're awfully comfortable right now, aren't you?  You are possessed by either an extraordinary confidence, or extraordinary stupidity.  Either way, I marvel."

Now he blinks at you, but it's not with the punch-drunk kind of wonder he'd held a moment ago.  "What… do you mean by that, Levi?"

He's bigger than you, but so is the vast majority of everybody, and you're confident you could knock him unconscious if necessary, broken ankle be damned.  You only need one foot to balance on and the other to sweep-kick, and the harsh metals of the brace should help with that.  Some of the fog in his inebriated gaze clears as he catches on to you sizing him up.  Good.  Let him squirm a little.  "I mean that I don't like you, Nile."

"Well, I don't think that's much of a secr—"

"I don't like your tactics, I don't like your priorities, I don't like your… morals, if you could call it that.  And I don't like your haircut."

His eyes rove upward, to his fringe, before he shakes the thought away.  "I'm not sure what we're talking about, here."

"Oh, you're not?" you say, sweetly as you can manage, and turn to face him.  His horsey face is drawn up into a cautious expression as if someone pinched a fistful of clay.  "Let's put this in _your_ terms, then, since you seem to only understand things that directly affect you: What would you do, Nile, if they came for her?"

"For… her?"

The higher his confusion rises, the faster your anger boils, and suddenly you hate this man, hate him and everything he stands for, which basically sums up to being a blind piece of shit while the world around him crumbles.  "Marie," you murmur, and his eyes tighten a touch at the implication that you'd hurt her.  Now _that's_ rich.  "What if they told you to stand aside, so they could take her, and kill her."  You're moving out of your stool and into the one between you, and the sliminess you feel at moving closer to him is outweighed by your satisfaction at making him writhe in his seat.  "Stand aside, or you'll be… what, fired?"  The words make you laugh, and you allow a giggle to pass through.  "What would you do?"

He glances you up and down, not to figure out if he can take you in a fight, but to figure out if the fight is coming.  "I'd…"

"Would you let them?  Would you really just stand aside and do nothing, for the sake of some political game bullshit, for your _job?_   Would you let them kill her?  Let them… shoot her, and be done with it?"

"I… are you threatening me?"

"That's not what a threat looks like, Nile.  A threat looks like this: If you don't want to die, you will never try to pull that bullshit again, because the amount of time I am willing to stand aside and let Erwin Smith call the shots on that boy's life is at a harsh fucking end."

"I… I have no idea what we're talking about."

"Then let me spell it out for you," you say, standing on the footrest under the bar so you're taller than him, even if it's by one meager inch.  His jaw is clenched but his hair is vibrating; he's shaking.  "You have no idea how grateful you should be that Erwin is in charge of making the plans, not me.  Because if it had been up to me?  Sure, you wouldn't have a titan in custody, but half of Stohess wouldn't have been destroyed either.  'Cause I wouldn't have bothered with any of that bullshit."  You knock back the rest of your drink in one and look him dead in the eye as you drop the glass on the bar top.  You're used to much stronger, so you don't do it for extra liquid courage; it's purely for the show, and it works.  Nile's eyes are locked on your mouth as you say, "I'd've just fuckin' killed you."

He stares you up and down, his face a sickly grey, and says nothing.

"Even with a leg so smashed up it's literally held together with pieces of bed frame, so smashed up I can't use maneuver gear — fuck, I can barely walk on it," you admit, holding out your bad ankle, and his gaze flicks there, finally understanding why you're here, leaving the dirty work to Erwin, and not butchering titans left and right to get your boy back.  "I don't care.  If you ever attempt to come between him and me again, I will cut your fucking throat.  And I won't care who's watching."

"Is it your intention," says a voice behind you, and you recognize this one immediately too — it's hard to misplace the voice of Dot Pixis, "to threaten to kill every branch commander today, Cap'n Levi?"

You turn slowly to look at him over your shoulder, and he's easing into the seat you've abandoned.  He withdraws a flask from a holster under his armpit.  You hadn't been aware Pixis had heard your threat on Erwin; you wonder how many other soldiers in that building did.  "Why," you say, your voice level, "you feeling unloved?"

"Oh, no," he says, taking your fork and pushing around the leftovers on your plate.  You guess you're done with that meal.  "Just wonderin' if I ought to get in line."

"That," you say, stepping away from the bar and turning your back on a thoroughly bewildered Nile, "depends entirely on whether you want to put Eren Jäger in a life-threatening situation."

"Oh, goodness no, I wouldn't dream a'touchin' that golden boy a'yours," he says.  He stuffs the last forkful of your potatoes in his mouth.  "Done me a world a'good here at Trost, pluggin' up that gate.  Made my job easier.  And that's a debt I intend to repay, if I can."

"Then we're square," you say, clapping him on the shoulder as you leave.  You neglect to tell him you haven't paid for your meal yet.  He can cover that, you believe, since he's so intent on finishing it.

You're four steps out of the building when you realize the torches are lit in the stable.

You didn't know your legs could move so fast with one broken to hell, but there you are at the side doors, and there's the caravan of wagons, and the 3-to-5 ratio does nothing to alleviate the swarm of moving bodies blocking your view of anything.

Your ankle throbs.  You try to ignore it, but when you step inside and put weight on it, it screams with such force it buckles your knee, and you stumble onto your good leg.

Hanji's familiar voice yells for Dirk, but you can't see either of them through the crowd.  Why the fuck is everyone and their grandmother taller than you?  You can't see over anyone's heads, and the cacophony of shouts and horses and boot steps is too loud to rely on following voices.  If you were Mike, you could just follow your nose.  If you bump into him, you'll make him hunt down Eren's smelly ass for you.

Dirk clips your shoulder as he rushes past without heeding your presence.  It throws off your balance, and you stagger to your good leg again.

In fact, tracking down the tallest people in the room seems like a good place to start.  Usually you don't have a problem locating them, rising at least a head above everyone else, but… perhaps it's the absolute turmoil, or maybe it's the unfamiliar surroundings, but you can't find either Mike or Erwin's towering forms anywhere.  And wasn't one of the kids in the 104th a fucking giant too—

…oh, wait.

Of course, there should be a reason for the absence of Bertholdt Hoover, the tallest among his companions.

Some absurdly childish part of your brain supplies that _one might even call him… Colossal_ and okay, what inanity has possessed you to think that's funny, don't you dare laugh.

You lock onto the familiar piercing trill of Hanji's voice, shouting "I need one on each corner!  Dirk, on my left.  Ready?  On three," and follow it with a limp to the first wagon in the caravan.  You see Dirk before you see Hanji, and he's hefting a corner pole of a gurney out of the wagon.  As the team lifts it and drops it to waist level, Hanji comes into view past Dirk, holding a far corner.  She's gripping the pole with one arm, her other spread wide and pointing as she shouts orders over the chaos of voices, and with a blink of shock, you realize the colors you're seeing on her face aren't an illusion of the light; the entire left side of her face is a swath of tomato hide, brilliant crimson with the dull shine of leather.  There's a blister the size of a grape in front of her ear, and it disappears in a cluster under the arm of her glasses and into her hairline.  The team starts to move with the gurney, and you're so stunned staring at Hanji's face that it takes you a few steps to realize they're rushing toward you.  You hobble back to let them pass, and Hanji doesn't even notice you barely moving out of her way, but in the space between her and Dirk, you register who's on the gurney.

The right side of the heavy tweed, normally starch white, is stained with blood from a tied-off stump that was once a complete right arm, torn off above the elbow, its edges ragged and the humerus splintered, a fragment of it lodged in the bicep.  Despite the hasty field tourniquet, a light dribble still issues from the brachial artery, a vessel whose bleeding out in full flow could kill a man in five minutes.  It's three hours back here from Castle Utgard.  Your brain plays with numbers, trying to determine the rate of flow and the number of liters remaining in the body, focusing on mathematics as a subconscious coping mechanism to prevent itself from registering the sight it doesn't want to see in the death-grey, open-eyed, slack-jawed face of Erwin Smith.

A stampede of memories flashes before your eyes, of you threatening to remove his head from his shoulders, of you nearly doing so and him holding the blade to stop you, him smiling as he asks you to publicly kick Eren's face in, him smirking as Mike pulls your face out of a puddle of sewage, and you don't even hate him, not for any of it, you couldn't, you never wanted to see him dead, you take it back, take it all back, and in the numbness of shock, the word is out of your mouth, dim and weak and desperate:

"Erwin?"

Moblit slips past you, and he actually hesitates, turns and looks at you, sees you staring at the gurney team as if you could rewind time, and says, "He'll be fine.  Just pushed himself too far, like normal."

Someone steps between you and the gurney team, blocking your view, and you force yourself to look away, to meet Moblit's eyes.  "You mean Hanji, or Erwin?"

He's moving again, and he shrugs, giving a short laugh that has nothing to do with humor.  "Does it matter?"  And then he's tripping to catch up with the gurney, throwing an arm up and pointing at another wagon and yelling "Ackerman!  You lie right back down this instant!" before he, too, is out of your sight.

You don't try to keep track of him, though.  Rather, you're looking toward where he gestured, because surely, where there's an Ackerman, there's a Jäger.

Your limp carries you just far enough to where you have a clear line of sight to the last wagon in the caravan, pulled off to the side so as not to block the front doors of the barn, and the first head you see is Jean Kirschtein, sitting on the far wall of the wagon and looking at and speaking to someone inside, blocked from your sight by the near wall.  Briefly, you see Mikasa sit back up before Jean practically jumps on top of her, his arms outstretched to coax her back down, and she relents.  Armin emerges from a stable and stands at the end of the wagon, gesturing for Jean to come down, and Jean moves from the wall to sit on the edge of the wagon floor.  Armin is on him immediately, brushing his hair aside in places to assess a gauze bandage wrapped around his head at the temples.

And then, in a moment that makes the earth stand still, there he is.

He steps out from the same stable as Armin and stands in the stall doorway, leaning on a post.  He's the only one you can see who isn't wearing gear, which doesn't make sense, because he definitely had it when he left.  His white jeans and his undershirt are both torn and grass-stained and bloody, though whether the blood is his own, you can't tell, as he likely would've healed by now.  He's pale and ragged, sweat staining his shirt from the arms all the way down to the hem, but he looks, miraculously enough, unharmed.

At the sight of him, Mikasa sits up again, and this time it takes both Jean and Armin to convince her to lie back, and even then, she only goes to her elbows — you can still see the top of her head above the wall of the wagon.  Eren stands in the doorway and replies with no emotion in his face or affect, no passion in his shake of the head as he speaks to her, nothing but a deep, immeasurable fatigue.

Jean looks up — possibly to see if Moblit is going to yell at them again — and his eyes lock on yours.

His head turns toward Eren, and he tips his chin toward you as he speaks, but his eyes never leave you.

Yours leave him just as Eren looks over.

And then he's moving, and you're moving, and you're limping and he's not, thank _God_ he's not, and before you know it he's in front of you, and you're holding his elbows and he's wringing his hands to resist touching you back, and suddenly, you know you don't want him to resist.

"Come on."

Your voice is so quiet in the commotion, you're not sure how he hears it, but he grips your proffered hand so tightly it hurts, and you welcome it, and not just because it's a distraction from the sharp shock in your ankle with every step — because it means he's here, he's alive and whole, as promised, and just about everything else on the whole damn planet can go fuck itself.

You lead him through the common room and into the hallway, and his grip on your hand never relents.

You speak as you move.

"Are you hurt?"

"No.  Reiner bit my arms off, but I've healed."  He huffs wryly, jiggles his hand in yours.  "Obviously."

"Always hated that guy."

"And you were right, Jesus you were so right, I'm so sorry I didn't want to lis—"

"It's okay, Eren."  On the first stair, you stop, meeting him at eye level.  His eyes are bloodshot and dilated and brimming with tears, his face gaunt.  He licks his lips, lets his mouth part, and closes it, as if he wants to say something but can't.  You squeeze his hand tighter.  "Did he hurt you?"

"Apart from biting my arms off?"

"Yeah."

"He choked me out when I tried to push him out of a tree.  That's it.  None of them touched me."

You frown.  _None?_   Not _neither?_   "It was more than just the two of them?"

"Ymir was working with them."  The name makes your stomach flip.  You remember Ymir, too, and fondly; she's got a blunt, dry sense of humor that coincides nicely with yours and you're pretty sure she's dating Christa Lenz.  Or… she was, at least.  Was she the third titan still in hiding, then?  "I thought they kidnapped her, but she went along with them once she woke up.  Maybe she was with them all along."  He looks away, shaking his head.  "Whatever."

You tug on his hand and keep leading him up the stairs, and you're nearing the top of the first flight when he says, "You're limping again."

"I took the brace off and put maneuver gear on.  Fucked it up pretty bad.  And then fucked it up worse just now, running back here from getting dinner."

"Shit."

"Yeah.  So I guess Erwin was right.  I couldn't have withstood going to get you.  Would've gotten myself killed.  Maybe even got you killed.  Very least, would've lost my leg."

He falters at the landing of the second staircase.  "The commander.  Is he… have you seen—"

"I saw," you cut in.  "Moblit says he'll live."

Eren blows out a skeptical breath through his nose.  "Don't see how."

You don't, either.

But you don't want to think about that.  For twenty, or ten, or even just five minutes, you don't want to think about that — you want to drag your boyfriend, your miraculously alive boyfriend, to bed and touch every naked part of him your hands can find and _revel_ in the fact that he's alive, he's here, he's _alive_.

But he's rubbing his eyes, and when you open the door and he sees his trunk across the room, he lets out a sigh of relief, and maybe the touching will have to wait.

"Go," you say, releasing his hand at last and gesturing toward the bed with one hand while you close the door with the other.  "You need sleep."

"I need _you_ ," he says, and no sooner has the door clicked shut than his arms are around you, crushing you against him.

For a moment, you just stand there, holding each other, your hands softly rubbing his back, breathing each other in.

And then he's laying kisses on your neck like hot coals, and you draw back and press his mouth to yours, and he's holding you so tight around the waist he actually lifts you up on tiptoe.

You didn't know he'd grown so strong.

His arms have thickened since he started weight training with you a month ago, and so have his legs, and as you strip his ruined clothes off him and slide up between them on the bed, you relish the hard pressure of them around your hips, pulling you in tight and holding you against him.

His hands slide up and down your bare forearms as you hold his knees, and his eyes rove down your chest to your stomach.  " _God_ ," he sighs, "you are _so hot_."

You don't know what it is that inspires him to blurt out such honest things like that, but there's nothing stopping you from giving it a try.

You run your hands down his thighs, squeezing gently, revering the supple give to his skin, and you look at his face, at the sharp angles of his chin that make his neck so damn kissable, at the low-set cheekbones and narrow nose that make his eyes look huge and bright and hypnotizing, and you've never seen anything that could stop your heart the way he does.  "You are the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes on."

He grins, and he pulls you in for a kiss, and if anyone were to ask you what heaven feels like, you would say it's his arms draped lazily over your shoulders and his finger tracing a bump of your spine and a heel of his foot digging into your ass cheek to press you forward, though maybe, for prudence's sake, you'd leave that last part out.

You extricate yourself from his embrace and move to your bag, rifling through it in the moonlit room for wherever the lubricant and condoms ended up through your haphazard redress this morning, and he rolls onto his side to watch your naked form as you move.  What could possibly be so sexy about your hunched figure, you can't imagine, but you give him the you-little-shit smile, and he returns it with a grin and a giggle, and that reaction makes just about every embarrassing thing in the world completely worth it.

You move back to the bed and put the jar of lube on the nightstand, and you're on your knees between his legs, you've got the condom in your hands, fingers moving to tear the foil, when he says, "No— Levi, don't—"

You look up at him, fingers frozen, foil intact.  "…Don't?"

His hands reach for yours, and after frowning through a confused moment of hands fumbling over hands, you realize he's trying to take it from you.  He says, "Don't."  
  
You let him get his fingers around it, but you don't let go yet.  "You don't want to?"

"No, I do, I just… don't want… one of _these_."

You stare at him, and the moonlight brings out the puppy-dog pleading in his eyes, making them shimmer in the dark.  He gives the most innocent little smile and the tiniest shrug of the shoulders, and you keep staring at him.

"You're kidding, right?"

"What?  I haven't eaten anything in like two days, it can't be that nasty down there, right?"

"Eren."

"What?"

"It's an asshole."

"But you stick your fingers in there without protection all the time!"

"Yeah, and that's hard enough for me."

"And you're strong enough that you still do it, see!"

"Do you notice how there are no orifices on my fingers that could get infections from shit particles too small to see getting into them?"

"Please Levi, please, I just, I really need you tonight, _all_ of you.  Later, next time, okay, if you never want to do it again, fine, but tonight I just…"  He releases the foil and wraps his hands around yours, and he watches his own fingers thread yours as he murmurs, "I want _you_.  Nothing in between."

You watch his face, and you're pretty sure yours is the expression that's pleading now.  You understand his feelings, and honestly, there's something in you that's deeply moved by how badly he wants to be connected with you in every possible way.  But there's something else in you, something primordial and insurmountable, the same something that forces you to wash your hands raw and change socks five times a day and carry a nail file and a clean linen and a vial of isopropyl, that curls up fetal and shrieks its revulsion at the very idea of it.

You ache for his feelings, and you yearn to satisfy them, but the force within you that shuts down screaming _no_ is not something you're capable of rejecting, any more than you're capable of rejecting gravity.

"Will it be a deal-breaker if I can't?"

"No."  He clasps your hands firmer, making your fingers bend the foil out of shape.  "No, it won't, because you're you and I understand if this is one of those things you can't ignore.  But…"  His eyes go watery in the moonlight, and his voice is choked.  "I _really_ don't want it to be."

"Eren…"  You've started to go soft under the stress, so there's no point in continuing to hold the condom, as you've got nothing to put it on anyway.  You lay the foil on the bed and hold his hands in yours, letting him knead your knuckles and the mounts under your thumbs.  He doesn't make eye contact, which means he knows you're about to tell him no and he doesn't want to get emotional about it, and you applaud him for that, but it doesn't make it any easier to say the words you know will hurt him.  "I… honestly, I don't either.  I want this to be something I'm able to do for you.  But I… I really, really don't think I can."

"Is there a way to, like…"  He gnaws his lip for a moment, still focused on the movements of his fingers.  "Clean it out?"

You hesitate to answer, because "Well… yes, there is, but you wouldn't like it.  It's not sexy at all."

"I don't care if it's sexy," he says, his eyes immediately flicking to yours.  "We can bring sexy back after.  As long as there's even a _chance_ you might be okay with doing this, I'll do whatever to make you comfortable enough to even consider it."

Now it's your turn to avoid eye contact.  "I can't promise I'll be able to go through with it, even then.  So the cleaning might be for nothing."  You sigh heavily, glancing at the discarded condom packet on the mattress.  "But I'll try.  For you, I'll try."

Bless him, he actually claps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Jean Kirschtein.
> 
> And I love Nile Dawk, even though Levi doesn't... probably because, unlike Levi, I don't actually have to interact with him.
> 
> I think if not for Marco's death kick-starting Jean from thinking "someone ought to do something" into realizing "I _am_ someone", he would've turned out just like Nile.
> 
> And I think Levi is wise to that, too. Even if he's not aware it's because of losing Marco, he's aware that there was a change somewhere recent, something that made Jean coachable and woke him up, and Levi is very happy to take advantage of the opportunity to educate him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deep down to my heart,  
> naked to the core,  
> all of me uncharted begs to be explored.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for graphic descriptions of violence, vague mentions of sexual assault, and the tiniest bit of consensual porn.

After you've laughed yourself hoarse, he says, "So… shower?" without any indication of want for further dawdling.

You do dawdle, though.  You can't help it.  It's not just the fact that you're hesitant to unloose Shit Fountain from your boyfriend, though that is a driving factor; it's also that you have no experience with actually doing it, and you can't be sure that it will work as completely as you need it to.

In the end, you have to tell him what to do and then leave the room, because absolutely no way in horse fucking hell are you capable of sticking around to witness the aftermath.  The performance you hear through the closed door is more than enough for you, thank you very much.  He makes all kinds of amused and uncomfortable noises as he follows your instructions — thankfully, the shower head is detachable and allows him to get things into the right position — and lets out a shriek of involuntary laughter.

"How much am I supposed to use?" he cries.  "How deep is it supposed to go — oH GOD THAT FEELS SO WEIRD, WHY—"

You don't answer him.  You stare out the window at the stables, the shadows that pass over the torchlit windows, and pretend you're not hearing the rhythmic thumping as he hops in place, as instructed, and questions the usefulness of it, as not instructed.

When he voids the byproduct, he laughs so hard it sounds like crying, and you close your eyes.  He tries to say something, but is cut off by his own laughter, and you don't bother trying to say you can't understand him.

He emerges from the bathroom naked and smelling strongly of soap, laughing so violently he's doubled over.  He barely makes it to the bed before he collapses.  He crawls up to you and flops onto his back, giggling hysterically, and you sit there in your corner, curled up and holding your own knees.

After a few minutes, when his laughter has subsided, he reaches up at an odd angle and rubs your shin.  "That was wildly successful, but I don't think I'm in the mood anymore."

"Oh thank god," you say, the words rushing out in a jumble like air escaping from a balloon, and he laughs.

"Pressure's off," he assures you, and you unfold in a heap, a doll with its strings cut.  He wastes no time winding his arms and legs around you, enveloping your body like a Venus fly trap, and you find yourself nose to nose with his grinning face.  Even though your skin is still crawling, you can't help but smile back.  You roll onto your side to face him properly and lift a hand to touch the back of your knuckle to his cheek.

His words of last night — God, was that only last night? — return to you: _You are my whole world_.

You believe him, and he's yours, though you're not sure you could explain to him why without sounding like a drunk.  All your life, you've been cradling the flame of rage, fanning it with fear and indignation and the hatred of blame.  And then this boy had come along, this pure-hearted teenager with a smile that could cure meningitis and the sun caged beneath his skin, and he'd reached in and cupped that flame and guided it away from you, taking it for his own.  And you'd let him.  You'd let him take control of the flame that had long since been all that kept you going, you trusted him with protecting the very essence of your being, and in doing so, he _became_ your reason for going on.  He had become the flame.

God, you sound drunk even in the safe confines of your own thoughts.

The image of Erwin on the gurney pops into your head, blood-soaked and sloppily dismembered.

Moblit seemed confident he would pull through.  You're not so convinced.

You watch his eyes, memorizing the kaleidoscope of striations.  What if that flame had been snuffed out today?

"For a moment there," you whisper, "I feared I'd lost you."

He whispers back, "For a moment there, you did."

All you can do is stare at him.

His eyes swell with emotion, and he has to blink it away and break your held gaze.  He says, "There was… a moment.  I thought… I thought he was gonna.  Come at me."

Your body flushes with sudden rage so fast it makes your stomach turn sour.  You don't have to ask who he's talking about.

"I was mocking him, him and Bertl both.  And he came down to the branch he'd left me on, and he started moving toward me.  And I only had stumps for arms, I tried to shove him out of the tree but I couldn't, and he pinned me down and started choking me and I couldn't fight him off, and I felt… just.  Absolute panic."

Your blood thunders hot through your temples.

"He didn't do anything, but I mean.  I don't know if he would have.  I was barely conscious so I'm not completely sure, but I think that was when the Corps showed up and they had to run, so whatever he might or might not've done, he got cut short either way."

There had been a group of men who had picked a fight with Isabel, once.  She'd snuck out to find them and try to show them up, but they were ready.  They'd attacked her in every way it was possible to attack a young girl.

Hours later, she'd fallen through the door and crawled to her mattress, sobbing and screaming with incoherent rage.  She'd never told you what had happened.

She hadn't needed to.

You'd taken the utmost pleasure in pinning them down, one by one, and slowly, _slowly,_ slitting their throats, watching them choke on their own blood until the life left their eyes.

You would _love_ to do the same to Reiner, giving him just enough time to heal before you do it again, and again, and again.

Eren's eyebrows pinch together.  "You okay?"

You snap out of it.  You force your jaw to unclench and take a deep, steady breath.  He's not ready to see that part of you yet.

"Yeah," you lie.  "I'm fine.  I'm just glad you're safe."

"Completely safe and sound," he says with a contented smile, and slides a leg between yours.  His smile slowly shifts from contented to mischievous as his leg inches upward, and he's looking downright impish as he presses his thigh into your crotch, rubbing gently.

But damn, does the boy ever know how to improve your temperament.  You lower your head to stare at him from under your eyebrows, but you're grinning.  "I thought you weren't in the mood anymore."

"Maybe," he says, glancing away.  His leg stills.  You're about to tell him you're just picking on him, he doesn't have to stop, but he says, "Can I ask you a kind of stupid and pretty personal question?"

You raise an eyebrow.  "What?"

"Why…"  His face is steadily turning the most amusing shade of red.  "Why do you have, like… so much.  Skin."  He glances downward.  "On your dick."

It's by a sheer miracle of nature that you don't spit-take in his face from the force with which the laughter explodes from you.  He giggles a little, too, his chuckles fluttery with nerves.  When you can speak again, you say, "I thought you were a doctor's son."

"I am!" he cries.  "But _he's_ the doctor, not me!  I don't know every single goddamn thing about physiology, do you think I paid attention to that shit?"

You're laughing again and have to calm yourself before you can say, "It's a foreskin.  Everyone with a dick has one."

"I don't!"

"That's because you're circumcised."

"Hanji used that word," he says.  "What does it mean?"

You stare at him. He'd handled Hanji's invasive question with a retort of his own, and it had sounded like he'd known exactly what he was talking about.  Your voice is bland.  "It means the foreskin has been surgically removed."

His face contorts with confusion.  "Why would anyone do that?"

"Mostly just because it's customary, but there can be hygienic reasons.  If you're in a consistently gross enough environment, the foreskin can trap bacteria and particulate, which can enter the urethra, leading to disease and infection."

He frowns down the length of your bodies.  "Why didn't you get yours removed, then?"

"No doctors."

"Oh."

"By the time I had access to medical personnel, it had already become pointless.  If the dick develops with a foreskin and then it's removed later in life, it can cause complications, least of which being irritation and inflammation.  Most people who are circumcised, their parents had it done to them when they were only days old to avoid all that shit."

"That's horrifying."

"No shit.  Plus, who the fuck would I _want_ to get intimate with my dick?  No one."

"Really?" he says, and his voice has gone playful.  He reaches a hand between the two of you and brushes fingertips over you.

"Well," you say, giving him a little smile.  "Maybe _one_ person."

He slides your foreskin over the head, letting it form rolls between his fingers on the way down.  "It feels so awesome, though."

"It certainly does feel awesome," you say, and your voice sounds husky, even to you.  He's watching his hand, not paying attention to your face, and you say, "Making up for lost physiology studies, there?"

He laughs, and it makes something flutter in your chest.

You decide to try that sharing-what's-on-your-mind thing again.  "You have the most delightful laugh in the world, you know that?"

His hand pauses and he blinks at you, surprise registering on his face.  "I always thought _you_ did."

That makes you let out a short laugh, eyebrows scrunching with bemusement.  "Why?"

He shrugs a shoulder, going back to his slow and reverent ministrations.  "It's one of the only times you're completely open and readable.  I like it."

You're swelling fast in his hand, but trying to ignore it and focus on the conversation.  You're succeeding only marginally.  "I guess I'm not a very open person, am I."

"Nah," he says, and you're impressed at his ability to multitask, "but that's okay.  You don't have to be."  Before you get the chance to let that sink in or reply, he grins and says, "Y'know when else you're completely open?"

You shake your head, but only get to do it once, because his hand tightens for a quick flick of the wrist, and it pulls a gasp out of you.

"When you do that," he whispers, and you giggle at him.

"You can feel free to continue doing as much of that as you want."

He does, and when he's pushed you over the edge and he's scampered to and from the bathroom to wash his hands with vinegar and is lying in your arms again, you say, "You're right, you know."

He quirks his eyebrows at you.  "About what?"

"About me being closed off.  I don't exactly have a great track record for keeping you in the loop, do I?"

"That's okay," he assures you again, brushing your hair out of your eyes with gentle fingers that smell of pickles.  "You don't have to be an open book.  Your thoughts and feelings are your own, and you can share as much or as little of them as you want to."

You give him a skeptical look.  "To you, though?"

"Yeah, even to me.  I'm not entitled to a running commentary on every single thing going on in your head."

"I disagree."  You extract his hand from your hair and lace your fingers through his.  He watches your hands as they entwine.  What you're contemplating is terrifying, something you've never done before, and it makes your hands tremble in his.  He notices, his hands wrapping around yours, and he stares at you with eyes widened in concern, but he doesn't prompt you.  You swallow on nothing in a dry throat.  "You deserve more, you deserve better.  If we're going to do this, then you deserve my complete trust.  And I have to honor that, and not feed you the same bullshit I dish out to everyone else, the collection of lies and half-lies that I'm mostly okay with people knowing about me."

His form stiffens, his gaze rooted on your hands.  "Have you been?"

"Yeah," you admit.  "And it's time to stop.  I never wanted to, but it's time."  And it's true.  Part of you is screaming, pulling away, violently denying having to say it out loud, any of it.  But the rest of you fills with a quiet, calm resolve.  You sigh, and it shakes.  "It's time to tell the truth."

"About what?" he says, his voice cautious.

"About everything."

You trace a knuckle over his cheek again.

What if he hates you for what you know?

What if he hates you even more for concealing it?

"Tomorrow," you vow.  "Tomorrow, I'll show you something I've never shown anyone.  And I'll tell you everything."

He watches you, and you watch him, boiling away in his fear and trepidation, his eyes wide and glistening.  He swallows hard, then lets out a long, quiet sigh.

"Okay."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My voice cracks.  
> I wait for it to pass.  
> Heart beats fast for words I can't take back.  
> And so I pray I don't drive you away,  
> because I'm scared of what I have to tell you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to joke on tumblr and twitter about "killing readers" with my updates because so many comments from you guys include a sentiment to the effect of "this LITERALLY MURDERED ME", but this chapter deals with death on a very personal and serious level, so if you'll forgive me turning off Funny Joke-Around Mode for a moment, there's something I want to say to you guys.
> 
> I've been there.
> 
> In a lot of ways, I'm _still_ there, sometimes. And I know how pointless and false and utterly irritating all the platitudes of "it gets better!!!" sound when you really, _really_ don't feel it, can't see how it could be true. And I'm going to tell you what they won't: You're right. It sucks. And it's always going to suck. But that doesn't mean there's no good to be found. Even when it feels like stumbling through a maze of total darkness, there will always be a light — your pet, your idol, your favorite song. It's there, and it's _something_ in the midst of all that nothing.
> 
> Hold to the point of brightness that keeps you going in the dark, no matter how small. You have the power to turn that tiny point of light into a beacon. I know you do, because you have fought so hard to make it to this moment, and listen: **_You have not come this far to only come this far._** You've been strong enough to make it here, and you are strong enough to keep going a little further, and a little further after that, and then a little further still, one day at a time.
> 
> Stay with me.

The last place you would've expected Levi to take you is a graveyard.

You'd seen it from the kill-strike training platforms during your years at camp, rows of flat feldspar tablets rising like teeth from the mouth of the earth, every few months occupied by another group of workers carving cavities into that soft ground and filling them in, marking another hole of rot that would never again be clean and unblemished.

There's a group of them in there now, some of them bent double with chisels over headstones, some submerged to the hip and hefting spadefuls of soil onto the damp grass, some cradling blood-soaked bundles of canvas and gently lifting them to the holes that would swallow them into the belly of the ground forever.

Levi's steps are slow and careful, but he leads you past them without a glance.

You walk behind stones marking freshly overturned earth, some of them just starting to sprout tender shoots of grass in the aftermath of the rain brought by dawn.  The number of new graves is far greater than the number you'd estimated, and it makes your stomach turn over, breakfast threatening to come back up and feed the worms with all the rotting dead.  Every mound of earth since the gates of Trost is here because you changed fate's plan; they wouldn't be here if not for you.

One of the stones bears the words MARCO BOTT, 19TH TRAINEE SQUAD LEADER, 835-850.  You devote all your concentration into pretending you didn't see it.

Has Jean been here?  Has he seen these stones?

Was he one of the people who helped put them here in the first place?

Maybe there would be even more stones here, if you hadn't transformed and plugged the gate.  Maybe these same bodies would be here anyway.  But that's not the point.  The point is that these specific deaths, these specific graves being here for the reasons they are, is directly a result of your actions.  It doesn't matter whether you did it yourself.  It's still your fault.  You changed the course of history, and because of that, every death that happens from that point forward is because of what you did.

Levi's footsteps are still slow and ambling as he takes a turn and leads you up columns instead of across rows, his gaze still pointed straight ahead.  He knows exactly where he's going.  In your mind's eye, you can see his boots tracing these steps dozens of times before, perhaps even while you were in training camp.  Have you watched him making this long-since familiar walk to visit his favored dead, and not known it?

His voice floats back to you over his shoulder, but he keeps facing forward, careful to step between the graves and not on them.  "I told you once that I don't know who my parents are.  Do you remember?"

You do, but you don't see what that has to do with the dead.  Unless… is he taking you to see his parents' graves?  Were they in the military?

"I can't see you, Eren, so you're going to have to respond out loud."

Oh.  "Yes, sir."

"Is that an acknowledgement or an answer to my question?"

"It's an answer.  I remember, sir."

"You don't have to call me 'sir', Eren, it's just us out here."

"Okay."

He pauses for a moment before continuing.  He says, "I lied to you."

The bluntness of his words feels a bit like a fist to the face.

"What?"

"I lied," he says again.  "Well… not really a lie, more like a deliberate misleading.  I don't know their names, and I know nothing at all about my father.  But my mother, at least, is not a complete mystery to me.  I remember her.  Not her name, but her face."

His hand reaches out and gently brushes over a stone as he strolls past.

MAJOR ILSE LANGNAR, 2ND BRIGADE COMMANDER, 823-849.

"My mother was a sex worker.  I've always assumed my father was one of her clients, but I don't actually know for sure, because she never told me who he was.  All she told me was that the master couldn't know I existed.  If he found out, he'd either turn me out or have me culled, and she'd always say, 'or worse' and not elaborate, and it took me until I was actually living alone on the streets as a child to figure out what she wouldn't say.  When you're running a brothel in the lawless underground, all fuckable bodies are money and all living bodies are fuckable to someone.  There are people who would rather not have a grown adult for a bedfellow."

He says it so calmly, it makes you shiver.  You pull your hood up against the mist that's steadily turning into a drizzle.

"She was fiercely protective.  She knew as awful as it was to have me hide in the oven or under the bed or in the wardrobe, it would be far worse to send me out without her.  So that's what I did, every day, sometimes several times a day.  For three, almost four years."

As incredible as it is that he feels comfortable sharing his past with you, you really don't want to hear any more about this particular part of it.  "How did you get out?"

"A john got her sick.  Started with tuberculosis, then like that wasn't bad enough, she caught pneumonia too.  Least, that's what I think it was.  Kind of fuzzy and hard to remember on account of I was barely more than a toddler at the time, but god damn, when she coughed I thought the world was going to end.  Took weeks for her to die.  I remember starving because no one wanted to bring food to her door for fear of catching it.  And I remember her dying.  Earliest thing I can remember with perfect clarity.  You ever seen a dead body, Eren?  Like, one that's been there a while, not just freshly killed seconds ago."

You haven't.  You wish you could make him stop.

"They turn yellow.  All the blood separates, white and red cells, and the red cells are denser and heavier so they sink to the bottom and all the white cells float to the top.  And when the bloat starts and the purge fluids release… god, they had to evacuate the brothel.  I remember that, too.  Shouts from the hall, heavy footsteps.  I hid under the bed and prayed the piss wouldn't sink through the mattress and drip on me."

Your stomach churns ominously.  If he doesn't change subjects, you're going to throw up.

"No one came in her room for a week after that.  They knew she was sick, but I guess they never put the pieces together that she'd died.  I sat in the corner next to the oven, watching her body bloat and then deflate into a slimy ball of hair and teeth.  And then… _he_ came in."

You don't have to ask who _he_ is.  The mystery man Levi mentioned before, the one who took him in, the one he broke away from later.  You're grateful for the change of topic, not just because you're genuinely curious about this guy, but because it stops Levi from talking about watching his own mother decompose, an image you'd rather not imagine yourself empathetic with.

"He said his name was Kenny, and he knew my mother.  He took me out, got me fed, taught me everything I know about combat — blades, fists, guns.  And then, when I was twelve… he left."

This is a disappointingly small amount of information that does nothing to satisfy your curiosi— …wait, what?  "I thought you said _you_ left _him_."

"Of course," he says, as if confirming grass is green.  He doesn't elaborate.

"So… which way was it?"

"Honestly?" he says, his footsteps slowing even further for a moment.  "I'm not sure.  I know he was the one who walked away from me.  I remember it like yesterday.  But… I've spent the better part of the last twenty years convincing myself I drove him away, that he left because he couldn't stand me anymore, that I was too strong for him to keep controlling.  And that in pushing him away, I broke free.  But I have no idea how truthful that is.  I've never seen him again, so I haven't exactly had the chance to ask."

"It's been twenty years, and you've never seen him again?  Wait, how old are you?"

"You should never ask that of a lady," he scolds, and before you can vocalize how baffled he's made you, he says, "Thirty-five on Christmas.  But no, I haven't seen him.  I spent the next seven-ish years just trying to stay alive and wondering why I wasn't getting taller, and then I found Isabel, hunkered over her mother's botfly-infested body, and damned if I could leave her like that.  And then a couple years later still, Farlan and his friends found us.  His friends weren't too fond of having a kid around, but I was scarier than all of them combined and I said she stayed, so they put up with her.  And staying in their house kept us off the streets, so their unrest was definitely within the realm of my tolerance.  Eventually, it was just him, her, and me.  Sometimes we had a group, sometimes not.  But we were the core of it.  So we were the ones Nicolas Lobov targeted."

"Who?"

He's got his head turned, looking at the stones, just enough that you can see a smile tug on his mouth.  "I'll get to that.  There's something else I need to tell you about Kenny."

"The guy who took you in."

"Yes."

"Was he your father?"

The moment the question is out of your mouth, you regret it; he's already told you he doesn't know who his father is.

He shakes his head, but he says, "I don't know.  I've suspected it.  He came for her when she was off the market and no one who knew her was coming by anymore, he said he knew her, he wasn't at all surprised to see me, he took me in when he could've just left me… it seemed to me that my mother and I meant something to him.  So I don't know, he could've been my father.  But I don't know for sure.  I know taking me in demonstrated a lot of attachment and responsibility from someone who wouldn't even hold down a residence.  And I don't mean couldn't, I mean straight up wouldn't.  He said it was safer to be always on the run.  'That'aways they cayn't getcha,' he'd say."

You almost laugh at the sudden emergence of an accent in Levi's impersonation of the man who raised him, but laughing might be in poor taste, so you don't.

"He never said who exactly he was on the run _from_ , though.  I always thought he meant just, anyone, everyone in general, but it wasn't until I was older and heard rumors of his whereabouts at the time that I realized what he meant."

"What did he mean?"

He's silent for a moment, and when he speaks, his voice is far away, like he's talking to himself more than you.  "You're from a border town on Maria, so I don't suppose you would've been that familiar with news from the interior… but your daddy was the Survey Corps doctor, so… maybe."

"Maybe… what?"

He turns his face away from you again, and you wish he wouldn't, because his voice is carrying that careful air of control and blankness, the one that turns your stomach in ropes.

"Have you heard of Kenny the Ripper?"

You have, but not for a long time.  The only thing that's been a meaningful topic of conversation since the fall of Maria has been titans.  "The serial killer?"

"That's the one."

He doesn't go on, and you're about to prompt him what that has to do with anything when the two puzzle pieces slide together before your eyes.  You nearly trip on your own toes.  "You mean—? _That's—?"_

"Yup," he says.  "Kenny the Ripper, Butcher of the Military Police.  Little more than ten years after he left, I heard a rumor he was working in the employ of the King.  I had it checked out, and it was true.  Royally appointed the leader of an elite squad of interior MP's.  Commanding the same people he'd slaughtered by the dozen a few years before."  He shakes his head, laughing to himself.  "What could possibly compel that man to take up an honest job, one for the military no less, I simply can _not_ imagine.  Maybe the King had something on him that was so great even he had to cave, but I doubt it.  There must be some kind of reward involved.  Far as I know, he's still there."

All of this is kind of going in one ear and out the other.  "You were raised by Kenny the Ripper?"

"Yep."

You blurt the first thought to pop into your head.  "Shit, no wonder you're so good in a fight."

He laughs his beautiful sparkling bubble laugh, a sound altogether unfitting for a rainy graveyard.  The graves as you pass are slowly blending in better with their surrounding turf, the grass not quite so vibrant with new growth.  His hand brushes another stone.  This far back from the new graves, the names are no longer familiar to you.

LIEUTENANT BRAUN ERSTE, 2ND FORWARD SQUAD LEADER, 822-845.

"What's he like?"

"Now?  Couldn't tell you.  But I don't imagine the basics have changed a lot.  Long hair, always wearing this ratty old ten-gallon hat.  Face like a deer skull.  He was growing this shitty little goatee, maybe he's finished it by now.  And tall as hell.  Granted, from my height everyone looks tall, but seriously — I was the same height then as I am now, and he is fucking _tall_.  I think he's taller than Mike, even."

"Damn."

"Yeah.  You could probably anchor off him with maneuver gear."

You can't help the burst of laughter that comes out, and he smiles a little again.

"Levi…"

He looks back at you for a moment, just long enough to let you know he's heard you, before he's watching where he's going again.

"Why are you telling me this?  I mean, you don't have to, y'know."

"We went over this last night, though.  I think I do have to tell you.  If we're going to do this, really do this, then I can't keep secrets from you.  It might seem unimportant, but if it's so unimportant, then why hide it?  And if it _is_ important, that's all the more reason I shouldn't hide it from you, right?"

You shrug, pulling your hood up tighter against the drizzle.  "I guess."

Levi's footsteps falter.  His body language has gone tight and tense again, all amusement and relaxation gone from his demeanor, his face as hard and stony as the grave markers he brushes fingers on.  He murmurs, "But what I'm about to tell you isn't just a gesture of trust.  It's more than that."

You don't know how to respond to that.

He looks up the row beyond the stone his hand is resting on.  He says, "We're here," and he turns down the row.

These stones are only slightly dulled by wind and weather.  Their carved names are beveled with wear but still easily legible.

LIEUTENANT FLAGON TURRET, SURVEY CORPS 4TH REAR SQUAD LEADER, 819-844.

SAIRAM OPFER, SURVEY CORPS 4TH REAR SQUAD, 825-844.

You frown.  Why this row?  What's so important about 844?  Numbers fly behind your eyes.  Six years… they restarted the expedition count when the long-distance formation was instituted, so considering the Corps does about ten expeditions a year… you blink surprise and rain out of your eyes.  844 would've been the year the count reset.  You may well be walking past the graves of those who were the first to use the long-distance formation.

Six years is a gap that means something to you for another reason, but you can't recall why.  It's certainly not the year Kenny and Levi parted ways, because if he's turning thirty-five this year, that would've happened twenty-three years ago, in 827.

At last, Levi stops.  You're so absorbed in thought, you nearly step on his heels.  You've come to a halt in front of a stone that reads FARLAN CHURCH, SURVEY CORPS 4TH REAR SQUAD, 823-844.

This name rings a bell even stronger than the mark of six years, but why, you can't recall.

You wait a moment, long enough that you start shivering again, but Levi does nothing.  He's stiff and nervous, and you want to ask what you're doing here and what's so significant about these graves, but you don't want to push him.  Impatience would be incredibly tactless right now, at a moment that is clearly distressing to him.

You're wondering if maybe he wants you to prompt him when he says, "What is your greatest guilt, Eren?"

The sound of the rain is faint, but his voice is fainter, and his words are all but swallowed by it.  You blink at the back of his head, the constellation of mist that shimmers in his hair, not sure you heard him correctly.  "My what?"

"Your greatest guilt," he says again, clearer now, but still cold and severe.  "Your biggest mistake.  The thing that keeps you up nights, kicking yourself for your own arrogance and stupidity and blindness."

You glance up at all the rows of stones you've passed by, at the brand new ones being pounded into the wet earth in the front rows.

It's hard to pick just one out of all those mistakes.

"I don't know."

"I do," he says.  For a moment, you think he's talking about you, but he lifts an arm and points at the stones beside you.

You follow the aim of his finger, but you can't tell if he's pointing to the stone in front of you, or the one just past it, closest to him.

ISABEL MAGNOLIA, SURVEY CORPS 4TH REAR SQUAD, 828-844.

This name is the one that pulls the others to a place of clarity, and pulls your stomach up your throat.

Sitting in Levi's bed in the warmth and the dark, his hand absently combing your hair, his eyes lost in a memory, telling the story of how Mike and Erwin forced him into the Corps — _"Isabel and Farlan were strangely okay with it, though.  They were always more adventurous than I was."_

In the mess hall the next morning, Reiner asking Levi, not knowing who he was, how long he had been in the Corps, the captain stirring his eggs with the nonchalance of boredom — _"Six years."_

And then, in that same mess hall just a few days ago, Levi staring into his teacup as if it held the answers to all the world — _"I left Isabel and Farlan with our squad.  I thought they would be safest there."_

Your own voice, half strangled with empathy.  _"But they weren't."_

 _"No.  They weren't."_   His voice empty, dead.  _"And maybe, if not for my damned pride, I wouldn't have had to pull Farlan's body from a titan's belly, or close Isabel's eyes on a head that was no longer attached—"_

He's glancing back now, bitter stare aimed over his shoulder.  He won't turn around and face you properly, dividing his gaze between the sliver of you he might be able to see and the stone beside him.

But _God_ , she was only sixteen.

Then you remember that's half a year older than you are now, and that Marco had only just turned fifteen when he died by causes unknown, and a flare of rage sparks in your chest — the flame you've been alternately fanning and fighting since you first understood the meaning of the word injustice.

She should still be here.

They both should.

"I told you once," he says, his voice soft and icy as the breeze itself, "that they died the way they did because I made a mistake."

You nod, remembering too late that he probably can't see the gesture.  "You did say that, yeah.  Did… did you lie about that, too?"

"No," he says, and you're struggling to hear him without encroaching on his personal space.  "But I left things out — about why we were in the Corps in the first place, about how they died.  I didn't tell you what the mission was that I left them behind to complete on my own."

You swallow hard, your throat dry despite the drizzle, suddenly not sure you want to know.  "No, you didn't."

"No," he repeats after you, his voice dull.  "I didn't.  I wouldn't have.  It would've required admitting to things no one is supposed to have any idea of."

If it's worse than the terrible secret he's been hiding about his childhood guardian and possible parentage, now you're _sure_ you don't want to know.  He's closed off from you, his heart and his thoughts somewhere far away, and you know the best way to help him heal is to let him unleash this burden he's been carrying for so long, and all you can do is stand there and let him speak.

So you do.  Stuffing your hands in your coat pockets, you don't make any move to stop or interrupt him as he shuffles in place, his movements slow and jerky as if pulled about by strings, and turns to face Isabel's grave.

He speaks with his eyes only for her, not you.

"We were supposed to kill Erwin."

_"What?"_

The word is out of your mouth the moment it's in your brain.  He doesn't seem to mind the interruption; if anything, he seems to have expected it, the tension in his shoulders relaxing with a quiet sigh.

"I told you, I knew he was coming for me.  I'd seen him before, and I was waiting for him to make his move.  But it's not just that I'd caught him watching me.  I had warning."  He pauses, maybe waiting for you to interrupt again, but you don't, so he goes on.  "Nicolas Lobov.  A noble.  Erwin had collected solid proof of him seizing taxes meant to fund the Survey Corps and funneling them instead into the Military Police.  Lobov thought Erwin meant to blackmail him into voting in favor of another Corps expedition, which he did at first.  But of course, Erwin being Erwin, didn't have blackmail as his endgame.  He knew his leverage wouldn't hold for long and Lobov would find a way to fire back.  So he had to eliminate Lobov as a threat entirely.  He sent the papers to General Zacklay.  Keith knew it.  Zacklay knew it.  But Lobov didn't."

You're not sure why any of this would be damning to Levi, but you don't interrupt.

"Lobov thought Erwin must still have the papers, intending to keep blackmailing him.  So he did some scouting of his own.  Went looking for people who were really, really good at killing.  Found us.  And of course, Erwin was still tailing him, so he must've seen Lobov after us and _that's_ why he was watching me that day.  But at the time, I thought it was the other way around.  That Lobov found us because Erwin had already spotted us.  Fucking stupid."  He pauses to snort at himself.  "Why would Erwin, the fucking mastermind, bother with something so trivial and straightforward as personally hunting down bandits from the underground?"  He shakes his head.  "Proves I really didn't know a goddamn thing."

You want to cut in, to tell him he didn't know Erwin and there was no way he could've predicted the man's mind games at that point, but you don't think he would see any comfort in you telling him what he already knows.

"Lobov hired us to get into the Corps, but let the Corps wrangle us up their way so they wouldn't suspect us of anything ulterior.  And once we were in, to find the papers and kill Erwin, in case he had any more tricks up his sleeve.  And in return for the papers, he would give us papers of citizenship in the city of Mitras.  I think we all suspected he would double-cross us, but really, what choice did we have?  We wanted out.  If we failed, what's the worst that could happen?  We'd just get sent back to where we already were.  Did we really have the choice to not try?"

He pauses to swallow hard, and something changes in his face.  Dread swirls sickeningly in your stomach; the bad part is coming.  You don't want to hear it, but this isn't about you, and just like Levi back then, you don't really have a choice.

"We waited until the perfect moment.  We had the cover of rain to hide our approach, the long-distance formation stretched out the ranks and took him away from his backup.  We had a plan to do it together.  But Farlan…"

He glances over at the stone next to you.

"He'd… set off warning flags, for me.  He knew how personal I'd made it.  He'd said I could be the one to kill Erwin, but I suspected that if he had an opening, he would do it himself before I could, because he hated seeing me turn into the monster I did when I killed for no reason.  I wanted that kill, Eren.  I wanted to cut his throat and watch him choke.  For humiliating me and making me powerless like that, I wanted to watch the light leave his eyes, wanted it even more than leaving the underground.  I refused to let Farlan take that away from me.  So I went alone.  And I justified it with the thought that if I went by myself, if I ran into a titan, at least it would be just me at risk."

He sighs, his voice shaky.

"But I wasn't thinking.  We were all outside the walls.  We were all at risk already, no matter how we grouped our numbers.  And when I came across the carnage of what was supposed to be the second forward squad, and the five sets of footprints, at least ten meter class each, heading back the way I'd come…"  He shakes his head again, stares down unseeingly at his own feet.  "I already knew I was too late."  He gives a wry, humorless smile.  "But did I really have the choice to not try?"

He looks up at you, and though the rest of his face is blank, your heart skips at the raw emotion in his eyes.  You can't tell if the tracks of wetness streaking his cheeks are rain or not.

"My horse slipped in mud and gore.  I fell on my face.  And when I made sense of my bearings, I realized I was staring at Isabel's severed head."

"Jesus."

He makes a sound that's almost a laugh, but too cold.  "God has nothing to do with this world, Eren.  Never did.  If there were a God, they would know they were both too young.  Too gentle.  And for the love of all that is holy, they wouldn't have given Farlan time to see I was there and wave goodbye before a titan ripped him in half."

This time, you don't say anything.

"I killed the titans.  All of them, myself.  And when the rain cleared and Erwin showed up, drawn by the smoke of evaporating titans, I tried to kill him.  But my heart wasn't in it anymore.  All I had to kill for was already gone.  And he saw my hesitation, and he took advantage of it to knock the truth into me.  It was the titans.  I didn't kill them.  Erwin didn't kill them.  Nicolas Lobov didn't kill them.  The titans did.  It's that simple."

His gaze has floated away from you, directionless, but now it locks on Isabel's grave.

"But it can't be that simple."

He stares at Isabel's stone, and you're not sure if the shaking of his head is intentional or subconscious.

"It can't be true that nothing I could've done would've changed anything.  It can't be, right?  If I had taken them with me, then… who knows?"

You don't answer, but you don't think you have to.  The same question has been ringing in your brain like the clapper in a bell.  _What if I hadn't trusted them?  What if I'd shifted and faced Annie as a titan with the squad and Levi to back me up?_

But he surprises you — abruptly, he turns to face you, his hands in his coat pockets, his gaze hard and clear.

"We might have all gotten killed," he says.  "We might have been too big a target, and drawn the attention of the titans.  I might not be standing here right now."

The thought stills you, but before you can think too hard on it, he has another one for you.

"Or what if we'd succeeded?"

He lets that question marinate in your brain for a moment, but you don't have an answer.

"What if we'd overpowered and killed Erwin, only to find the papers he carried were a decoy meant to draw our eye while he sent out the real ones in secret?  What if we had killed Erwin Smith, Eren?  Humanity can't survive without Erwin Smith.  His brain alone is the one thing that's keeping this whole horrible war machine spinning in our occasional favor instead of just mowing us all into the fucking ground."

He lets that sink in, too, and now you do respond.

"So… you're saying everything happens for a reason, is that it?"

"No, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to claim omniscience or any other such horse fuckery," he says, his eyes flitting back to Farlan and Isabel's stones.  "What I'm saying is exactly the opposite, actually.  It's what I've said to you before, time and time again — you never know how things are going to turn out.  You can't look back on your actions and think, 'if only I hadn't X, if only I'd been brave enough to Z, everything would be okay.'  You can't know that.  You have no idea what might've happened.  As arrogant as it is to assume that there's a plan, it's that much more arrogant to assume you have any degree of control over it."

You follow his gaze to the stones.  Farlan had been twenty-one.  Like Erd.

"Why are you telling me all this, Levi?  You said it's more than a gesture of trust."

"It is that," he says, "and also because it's eating you alive, thinking you could have saved them."  He's looking at you again, but he's nailed it, and you don't have the guts to look him in the eye right now.  "I'm not saying you couldn't have done it.  But I'm also saying you could've gotten us all killed, all of us, me included.  She might've killed you.  She might've killed Erwin.  You have no idea what might have happened.  My squad's death isn't the result of your inaction, Eren.  It's just Annie.  That's all."

You look up at him, at the gleaming track of water down his cheekbone, the best you can do right now.  "But it can't be that simple."

"I know," he says, his voice soft, assenting.  "But it is.  You can mourn, Eren, you can grieve.  You can even hate.  But you can't regret.  You don't have the right to regret.  All you can do is take the progress you've made and keep moving.  You stop to dwell on the losses, you stop moving, and all your progress goes to waste.  So don't you ever stop to regret.  Don't you dare."

You know you're going to need time to let this all sink in, to mull it over and let yourself calm down and digest it, so you don't have the capacity to give an articulate, well-thought-out response.  All you can say is, "Okay."

He lets you stand there a while, staring at the graves as if you could communicate with them, and he stares too.  How often does he come here and just stand in this field, staring at their names?  Does he speak to them?  What would he say if he did?

If they could speak, what would they ask him?

You wonder if his friends would approve of him dating someone less than half his age.  Did they ever imagine him dating anyone at all?  Or were they, like him, too focused on just surviving to the next day?

He steps forward, over where Isabel lies, and places a hand over her stone.  For a moment, he just stands there, his fingers slowly moving over the rain-slicked rock, a gesture strangely reminiscent of what he does to your hair sometimes at night.  His eyes are welling up, getting shiny, and you know it's not the rain this time.  You muster the decency to look away, but in the split second before you do, you see his mouth move.

You're not good at reading lips, so you can't tell what he whispers to her, but you decide that to try would be an invasion of privacy.

You start to back away, to give him some space and time alone with the only family he's ever known, but he mistakes your gesture for wanting to depart and he turns to follow you.  His hand lingers on Isabel's stone and trails over to brush Farlan's, too, but he doesn't say anything to the boy who saved him from the streets.  Maybe he's already said all he needed to say.

He lets you lead the way back down the rows, silent.

By the time you reach the front again, the rain has faded into a gentle mist that's little more than fog.  At last, he steps up beside you, threading an arm through yours and gripping your elbow.  He's holding on with a little more force than normal, and you wonder if he's using you as a crutch again.  You glance down at his ankle.  He's not limping much now that his leg has had a night to recover from its abuse yesterday, but he's still favoring it a little.  Maybe the rain is making it worse.

"We should get you more Lidocaine when we're back inside," you suggest, and he nods.

He opens his mouth, but drugs or his ankle are not the topics on his mind.

"There's one more thing I want to tell you," he says.  "And it might… change things.  But it's like I said.  It's important enough that it really shouldn't be hidden."

Unsure what to make of this, looking to break the tension, you joke, "Are you a father?"

He looks up at you, his expression withering, but you can see the trace of amusement in his eyes.  "No," he says, and the amusement plays at the corners of his mouth for a moment before it's gone again.  "No, it's… worse than that."

"You're pregnant?"

"For the love of God, Eren," he says, and you rub his hand on your arm, giggling, "Sorry, sorry."  He takes a moment to let you realign with his somber mood before he says, "It's about my last name."

"I thought you didn't have a last name."

"I don't have a last name that comes from my parents, no.  Far as I know, anyway.  But on paper, we have to have a last name, y'know.  We all do.  So I took Kenny's, because it was the only last name I knew."

"That's not a bad thing, y'know," you say.  "Plenty of people take last names from their adoptive pare— …well.  Guardians.  Mikasa thought about taking my parents' name for a while, until Dad talked her out of it."

Levi's face is grim.  "Maybe it would've been better if she had."

You frown.  "Why?"

"Look, I'm just… I'm just gonna tell you what I overheard from Kenny, okay?  I don't know how true it is.  But at one point, he was with his friend Uri, and I was eavesdropping.  And Uri remarked that he hadn't found anyone else out there with with Kenny's last name, and Kenny laughed and said maybe that was because people with his name tended to come up dead.  He said the only few remaining members of his family had vanished for fear of becoming another statistic, somewhere they'd never be found by the interior, and he wasn't about to tell Uri or his people where they were.  I don't know if they realized I was listening.  But I heard them say his last name.  And when I had to register a legal surname when I enlisted, it's the only name I could think to put down."

You're still frowning.  "What's that have to do with Mikasa?"

"Oh, come on, Eren," he says, rolling his eyes.  "Use your brain."

But you're not seeing it.  What _would_ Kenny's last name, dangerous enough to drive his remaining family into hiding far from the interior, have to do with Mikasa?

…unless…

… _oh._

You're seeing puzzle pieces connecting before your eyes again, except this time, it's the whole damn puzzle, flying together to form a whole as if magnetized.

"Ackerman."

You don't look at Levi, but peripherally, you can see him nodding beside you.

"She's related to Kenny the Ripper?"

"Looks that way."

"She's related to _you?"_

"I don't know.  Maybe."

"Shit, am I like.  Sleeping with my sister's cousin or something?"

He laughs.  "I don't know, Eren.  Mayb—" But suddenly, he cuts himself short with a gasp, tight in his chest, his hands clenching around your arm, and stops so abruptly he jostles your shoulder in its socket.

You turn to stare at him.  "What?"

"No."

"No what?" you say, starting to get frustrated at his sudden ambiguity, but you follow the line of his wide-eyed stare.  When you see what he's seen, it wipes your thoughts of everything to do with Isabel and Farlan and Kenny Ackerman the Ripper as your stomach shoots up into your throat and falls out of your ass at the same time, shock and empty disbelief wrestling with sheer all-filling rage.

You're walking past the newest graves, the ones just being filled in today.  And a worker in muddy coveralls, oblivious to your distress, is piling shovelful after shovelful of thick dampened earth on a grave in front of a fresh, crisp feldspar stone that reads LIEUTENANT MIKE ZAKARIUS, 1ST FORWARD SQUAD LEADER, 813-850.

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr: [leviebooks.co.vu](http://leviebooks.co.vu)  
> my twitter: [pentaVIP](https://twitter.com/pentavip)  
> my lovely betas for this series: [Ali](http://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrienix) and [Lee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/applepi)
> 
> tracked tags: [#leviebooks](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/leviebooks), [#Eren Can't Read](http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/eren-can't-read)  
> tags I use: [#Eren Can't Read](http://tumblr.com/tagged/eren-can%27t-read), [#fic: Run To You](http://tumblr.com/tagged/fic%3A-run-to-you), [#fic: It's Funny Because Eren Can't Read](http://tumblr.com/tagged/fic%3A-it%27s-funny-because-eren-can%27t-read), [#Cap writes](http://tumblr.com/tagged/cap-writes).
> 
> got questions? check my [ECR FAQ](http://leviebooks.co.vu/ecrfaq) and [#ECR asks](http://leviebooks.co.vu/tagged/ecr-asks).
> 
> [all fanart for this series](http://leviebooks.co.vu/tagged/fanart)


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